Albert J. Myer
In war and peace, from person-toperson contact to nationwide weather reporting, Albert J. Myer was one of the great American communications innovators of the 19th century.
Albert J. Myer was born in Newburgh, Orange County, on Sept. 20, 1820. He graduated from Geneva College (now Hobart College) in 1847 and earned his medical degree from Buffalo Medical College in 1851. During his college years Myer worked for the Buffalo Telegraph Company and was fascinated by telegraph coding. Telegraphs used a code of “dots” and “dashes.” A dot was a quick tap of the telegraph key, while you held the key down a moment to make a dash. Different combinations of dots and dashes stood for letters of the alphabet.
Myer saw the hand movements of a telegraph operator as a kind of code. For his doctoral thesis, he invented a language for the deaf inspired by telegraph code. With it people could communicate by tapping “dots” and “lines” onto a table, or into each other’s palms. Hearing-impaired people would see or feel the code and recognize the language.
When Myer joined the U.S. Army as an assistant surgeon in 1854, he invented a movement-based code for military communications. Using his “wig wag” code, a flagman would move the flag to his left or right, or in front of him. Each letter of the alphabet was represented by a different sequence of flag movements. This was more economical than the Navy’s semaphore code, which required two flags. Because Myer’s code was based on movement, it could be used at night with a torch instead of a flag.
The Army adopted Myer’s “wig wag” system in 1860 and made him its first Signal Officer. The “wig wag” code had to be changed constantly during the Civil War because one of Myer’s early students joined the Confederacy and showed them how to use it. By contrast, the Union army was slow to respond to Myer’s request for an expanded Signal Corps.
The government finally authorized an expanded Signal Corps in 1863, but Myer soon overstepped his bounds. He believed that military telegraphs, operated by a separate corps, should come under his command, but vested interests opposed him. In November 1863, Myer was demoted and reassigned away from the main combat action.
After the war, the government restored Myer to command of a reorganized Signal Corps, complete with command of military telegraphs. Myer’s new challenge was to find a peacetime use for the Signal Corps. Instead of reporting the movements of military formations, the Corps would now report the movements of cloud formations.
In 1870, the Division of Telegrams & Reports for the Benefit of Commerce began tracking and reporting storms as they moved across the country. Beginning in 1875, the Signal Corps issued daily weather bulletins. This was the beginning of the U.S. Weather Bureau, the precursor of the National Weather Service.
At the 1873 International Meteorological Congress, Myer proposed a global weather reporting system. His ultimate vision would become a reality after his death on Aug. 24, 1880. Fort Whipple in Virginia, home of the Signal Corps training school, was renamed Fort Myer in his honor.
For more about the National Weather Service, explore their interactive timeline online at http://www.weather.gov/ timeline.