The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-05-04

leading into a vessel of exactly one tenth the superficial area of the mouth Of the funnel. The water in this vessel is measured, and if there Is ten inches of water in it, the rainfall has been one inch. At the more important stations, the rainfall is measured by self-reeord- ing instruments, which are graduated to one-hundreth of an inch.
 The weather bureau costs Uncle Sam about Sl,500i000 year. Over against this may be set the fact that a single cold wave warning once saved s, ,500,000 worth of property, that flood warning saved s15,0O0,Ooo worth of property and many lives in the Mississippi valley, that storm warnings displayed one day detained in port coast vessels with their cargoes valued at $30.0O0000, which otherwise would have had to reckon with one of the most terrific hurricanes ever known on the Atlantic
 The daily service of weather predictions was begun in the United States in 1870, py the signal corps of the army. and at first was designed to aid the naviga- tors of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic coast. Its scope and purpose were grad uany enlarged and in 1891 it became a branch of the department of agriculture, under the name of the weather bureau. Under the army regime the heads of the SHfNlce were ATtHeFdlS MNef, lD1u11f ttdZe0 and Greedy, and under the department of agriculture, Professors Harrington and Moore. Professor Moore, the present chief has been conducting the affairs of the bureau since July, 1895. The work of the service has grown constantly, and in the past few years, thanks to rural free delivery and the telephone, 1t has increased it's scope to a wonderful de- gree. Each day the observations taken the day before are added to the stock of knowledge of the experts, and with each day the errors arising from inadequate knowledge are fewer. The service is be- coming more and more efficient, and while 1t never will be perfect and infallible, it is destined to have a great share in the continued prosperity of the country.
 To the United States belongs much of the credit for the development of the science of meteorology. Benjamin Frank lin, by means of his own observations and his private correspondence. found that storms moved northeastward from Philadelphia toward New England. Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and James Madison at Williamsburg, in Virginia, took a series of simultaneous obserVa- tions in the years 1772-1T7, and certain conclusions were drawn from them, so that the belief took shape that storms had a certain progressive movement and a whirling motion at the center, the foun- dation of the science as It IS known To- day. About the same time two French scientists proposed to establish stations oyer large territory and to take ob- servations to discover the rules of the storm kings court.
 But it was the invention of the tele- graph that made the plans practicable Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithson- ian institution, who had aided in the per lection of the telegraph, began to draw weather maps and as easly as 1856 he displayed them each day at the institu- tion In Washington. The civil war in terrupted the work in America. In 1863 France began the publication of daily weather map which has been kept up ever since Seven years thereafter the United States began to issue it's daily map. Now the American meteorologists rank at the head among the scientists of the world. What difference there is be- tween those days when science kept to- herself proud arstocrat, and these days when she calls up two million farm CTS over the telephone to help them with their work
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