Weather pioneer’s silver lining to clouds of doom
On April 28, 1865, Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy sent his final missive to The Times, a prediction of the weather for the following day.
Then, after waiting just long enough to see if it was correct, he kissed his daughter goodbye, locked himself in his dressing room and took his own life.
After five years of merciless lampooning, his and The Times’s foray into weather forecasting was, he believed, a failure. FitzRoy – who had captained HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin’s famous voyage, and was Governor of New Zealand from 1843 to 1845 – was a broken man.
Were he still here, he might feel vindicated. The records he produced for The Times are considered so valuable that scientists are calling for the public to help digitise them.
‘‘This was the start of weather forecasting,’’ Ed Hawkins, of Reading University, said. ‘‘For the first time, someone was looking at the weather, and trying to interpret what happens next.’’
FitzRoy began forecasting after a terrible maritime disaster.
In 1859, a steam clipper, the Royal Charter, sank off Anglesey. Some 450 people drowned. FitzRoy believed that lives could have been saved if the nation had invested in storm warnings, and he convinced the government to fund him.
FitzRoy set up weather stations that would telegraph daily readings to London, where
they were printed in The Times.
The forecasts were sketchy but the data that he used, Hawkins said, was priceless. As part of British Science Week, Hawkins has set up a website to crowdsource its digitisation.
FitzRoy’s forecasts initially proved popular. People soon began to notice, however, that they were not always accurate. In 1862, one paper said: ‘‘FitzRoy’s weather prophecies in The Times have been creating considerable amusement.’’
FitzRoy fought back against the mockery in the letters pages, but in 1865 it became too much.
– The Times