by Lee Sandlin
Espy, though, had an idea. He brought it to Adams a few weeks after their first meeting. Espy proposed, Adams recorded in his diary, “that a portion of the fund should be appropriated for simultaneous meteorological observations all over the Union, with him for a central meteorologist, stationed at Washington with a comfortable salary.” That idea pleased Adams no more than any of Espy’s other talk.
But Espy stayed on in Washington City and continued to press whatever political contacts he could find. (He did have several well-connected friends at the Franklin Institute.) By the middle of that summer, one of them came through: he was appointed a consulting mathematician to the secretary of the navy. Whether or not the job was supposed to have any real duties Espy wasn’t entirely clear. But he decided to seize the opportunity anyway. He rented rooms in Washington City (his wife, Margaret, remained back home, away from the foul night fogs and swamp gases of the capital) and declared himself to be the War Department’s official meteorologist.
It was not an implausible position. The War Department had been accumulating meteorological records for decades. Army doctors were supposed to keep detailed logs of the weather, because it was believed then that most illness was caused by the fogs and fumes of the atmosphere. As it happened, nobody had ever done anything with these logs, but Espy had a use for them: he wanted to make them the baseline for a new nationwide system of meteorological observation.
It was one of his most audacious ideas, but he went about it with admirable practicality. He knew that he couldn’t pry funding for any such system out of the government, but he believed he could attract volunteers. That had been, after all, one of the continual surprises of his lecture tours: how many people in America were interested in the weather. So he wrote a circular letter addressed “To the Friends of Science in the United States, Canada, West Indies, Bermuda, etc.,” and he mailed it to hundreds of universities, newspapers, government agencies, and scientific associations. (One of the perks of his official position was free postage.) The request was simple: send in any and all meteorological observations, records, diaries, and journals, past and present, and “enclose to the Navy Department, Washington City, Care of J. P. Espy.”
Within a year he was drawing the first national weather maps. He also began assembling specialized data concerning tornadoes and thunderstorms. He sent out more circulars, this time pushing his own theories: he declared that he was particularly interested in patterns of fallen trees in the wake of tornadoes and also any evidence of rainfall after large fires.
In the meantime, he became practiced at working the government bureaucracy. This was a practical necessity, because he had to wheedle the annual reauthorization of his salary in the federal budget. John Quincy Adams recorded another visit from Espy in 1844; he was startled to learn that Espy had never left Washington City. “Mr. Espy, the storm-breeder, came with a complaint that the Committee of Ways and Means were about to retrench the appropriation for some small interloping office under the War Department with which he has been allowed for the last two years to pursue his study of storms.” Espy was prepared with a sales pitch about the importance of his work: “He said that he had contemporaneous observations made at a hundred and fifty military stations, the results of which he had reported to the Secretary of War, and his report had been communicated with that of the Secretary, accompanying the President’s annual message to Congress, and he showed me ninety engraved maps, on which was marked the direction of all the storms at the several stations of observation, all confirmative of his theory.”
Espy got his salary approved that time. But the next year it was more difficult. By then his superiors in the War Department had finally caught up with what he was doing and informed him that they had no use for a professional meteorologist. What they wanted was the actual job description: a mathematician. They expected him to do mathematical analyses of their countless engineering projects.
Espy made a few attempts to appease them. He offered the department a practical project of his own: a design for a new ventilator, based on his theory of steam power. It was a conical metal cap that could be fitted to a chimney, which created a convective effect that resulted in a stronger draw. Espy later claimed that this design was such a success that it was installed on every chimney in the White House.
But most of the assignments he was given he simply ignored. In 1843, the secretary of the navy ordered him to break off his storm studies and report for duty at the Depot of Charts and Nautical Instruments; Espy refused. In 1845, he was assigned to a naval vessel in order to carry out a long-term mission involving military engineering and mathematics. He declared it would interfere too much with his real work, and he resigned.
He didn’t stay unemployed for long. Congress had at last disgorged the Smithson bequest, and an institution was being duly created for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.
The Smithsonian Institution was officially founded in 1846. Its director (the official job title was first secretary) was Espy’s old friend and colleague Joseph Henry of Princeton. Henry’s brief was open-ended: find some way of fulfilling Smithson’s intentions. He took it as an invitation to be ambitious. From the beginning, he wanted to put the Smithsonian at the heart of American science. He ordered the construction of a library and public museum in Washington City—something along the lines of the Franklin Institute but much more imposing. He put out a general call for scientific archives and collections. He wanted anything and everything: exotic butterflies, whale teeth, Native American artifacts, antique scientific equipment, fossilized prehistoric fish. He determined that the institution should start a printing house and become the leading publisher of scientific books. He began by acquiring a major work in manuscript: the first substantial archaeological study of the mysterious Mound Builder culture of the ancient Mississippi valley.
Henry most wanted to make the Smithsonian a home for the latest and most daring research. He was especially interested in research on American weather. James Espy was one of his first hires.
Henry was impressed with the weather records that Espy had been collecting through the War Department. He had the political capital to make Espy’s project into something much grander. He persuaded the federal government to give him priority access to the lines of the new telegraph companies then being strung around the country. Each morning, volunteer weather spotters would be given first rights to send their messages to the Smithsonian in Washington City, and for the first time there would be current weather information available for the whole country.
Espy had managed in the end to attain his impossible goal. He was now America’s official meteorologist. But it rapidly became obvious that this wasn’t enough for him. He wasn’t prepared to sit in an office in the Smithsonian and do nothing but review streams of incoming weather data. He wanted immediate federal authorization for his rainmaking scheme; he intended to remake the entire climate of the nation at a single stroke.
Soon after he began working at the institution, he wrote up a formal summary of his plan, and he began another series of public lectures around the country to promote it. He wanted enormous fires set along a series of longitudinal lines throughout the western region of the country. Each line was to run for at least seven hundred miles. He calculated it would take about a week of continuous burning for the rain clouds to form. The rain would fall in moderate amounts beginning in the fire zone and then spread eastward across the whole country. “It will rain enough and not too much in any one place,” he said—only a few hours per fire. He promised that the rain “will not be attended with violent wind either on land or on the Atlantic ocean; that there will be no hail nor tornado at the time of the rain, nor intermediate; that there will be no destructive floods, or injuriously low waters; that there will be no oppressively hot nor injuriously cold weather.”
The larger benefits would come as soon as the rainmaking system was fully in place and in continuous operation: “Farmers and mariners will always know, in advance, w
hen the rains will commence, or nearly so, and when they will terminate; all epidemic diseases originating from floods and droughts, will cease; the proceeds of agriculture will be greatly increased, and the health and happiness of the citizens much promoted.”
If federal backing wasn’t immediately forthcoming, he believed that the citizenry shouldn’t wait but should start setting the fires themselves. They should save up all combustible materials until the first dry spell of summer. Then the fires should be set weekly, in stages along lines of longitude, according to a schedule he had devised: “Let all west of 87 degrees of west longitude set fire to their materials only on a Thursday, those west of 90 degrees in the morning at ten o’clock, and those east of 90 degrees at six in the evening,” and so on. He hoped that all citizens would participate, “not only because all are interested in the probable result, but because it will be attended with no expense.”
He thought the project would be so cheap because of the ongoing and rapid deforestation taking place in the American interior. As he wrote: “There is at present, and will be for many years to come, a vast amount of timber cut down in clearing lands, and burnt every summer, in the western parts of the United States; enough, perhaps, to produce the wide extended rains so much desired.” He estimated that the total cost would add up to “a sum not amounting to a half a cent a year to each individual in the United States.”
After William Redfield had given up on his debates with Robert Hare, he retreated to his study and occupied his idle hours (more and more of them, as he gradually turned over his business to his partners and his son) in amateur research. Over the years he built up an immense private library on ocean navigation in general and on the Atlantic in particular. He became the leading expert on the Atlantic in all its peculiarities. For one maritime publisher he wrote a detailed guide for navigating the most treacherous coastal waters of northern Europe and the British Isles. For another, he provided a meticulous catalog of the North Atlantic ice fields. He did all of this from his desk; he never once in his life sailed the Atlantic out of sight of the American coast.
His most sustained work was an exhaustive study of three major Atlantic hurricanes. The project took him years. For just one of the hurricanes—his son estimated—he accumulated and analyzed logbooks from 164 ships: “How well do I remember the hours which my father spent extended upon the floor over a large chart of the Atlantic Ocean, on which he was plotting the facts recorded in the log-books of the ships, which at various points over an extent of thousands of miles had encountered the various phases of that terrific hurricane.” The work met with the expected response from the scientific community. “A writer in one of the English scientific journals,” his son wrote, “had the effrontery to say that not one of the contenders for the rotary movement of storms had ever collected a sufficient number of observations from both sides of a storm-track to prove the rotation!”
Redfield continued his collaborations with Lieutenant Colonel Reid; it remained the closest and most harmonious friendship of his life. They shared a passion for pure research with no thought of theory. One time Reid delighted Redfield with a gift: observational records from lighthouses on the European coast of the Atlantic. Redfield responded with copies of American ships’ logs, for presentation to the British Admiralty. Reid tirelessly recommended Redfield’s pamphlets to British scientists; Redfield pressed on his American friends copies of Reid’s monograph An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms. Their fondness for each other never flagged, even though—or perhaps because—it was strictly a postal relationship; the two men never met in person.
Their most significant project was a set of navigation guidelines for mariners in hurricanes. Their advice was simple, practical, easy to follow, and extraordinarily effective. Ships’ captains and navigators who didn’t have the slightest idea whether or not hurricanes were rotational could testify that the guidelines worked. By the mid-1840s, the standard navigation handbooks—books like Piddington’s Horn-Book, a copy of which could be found in almost every ship on the high seas—routinely cited Redfield and Reid.
Redfield also found himself an accepted member of the American scientific community—somebody who could be counted on to organize committees, write letters of recommendation, find potential donors, and sit on advisory boards. When the American Association for the Advancement of Science was founded at the end of the 1840s, the organizers’ first thought for a chairman was Redfield.
Robert Hare retired from his professorship at the University of Pennsylvania in 1847. He then made what he believed to be the greatest possible gesture of support for the Smithsonian: he donated to it his laboratory. All his intricate gear, his historic oxyhydrogen blowpipe, his custom-made vials and ceramic pestles and electric plates, his furnaces and sand baths and alembics and evaporating ovens, were crated up with exquisite care and shipped to Washington City. Hare intended it to be of some use to the Smithsonian’s younger researchers, but he was also expecting it to be appreciated at its true worth: as the invaluable archive of one of America’s greatest scientists.
Retirement didn’t mellow him. He had even more time for his relentless correspondence: time to quarrel, to pick out flaws in the published work of his rivals, to chide authorities in the field for succumbing to dubious new theories, and to claim credit for ideas that he thought were being stolen from him without attribution. He hated idleness. He was a rich man who had no pressing need to work, but he was driven to find a new career anyway. So he decided to make a go of authorship.
He had always written—not just his professional papers and his controversial pamphlets, but reviews and essays of opinion for newspapers and journals on economics, history, and politics. Now he set out to master a new field: historical romance. It proved much harder than he expected. The composition of his first novel was a tough slog. He had no easy way with plot or character. He was helpless to move the story forward without the heavy use of coincidence, and his powers of invention were such that he was obliged to have all the major dramatic events take place offstage. Still, he managed to drag his novel through to the end. The title was Standish the Puritan: A Tale of the American Revolution, by “Eldred Grayson, Esq.”
As a literary experience, the novel serves mainly to demonstrate the total stranglehold that Sir Walter Scott had over American fiction in that era; without the examples of Rob Roy and The Tale of Old Mortality in front of him, Hare would have been unable to write the novel at all. But what may be even more striking is the emotional iciness of its lead characters. The plot ostensibly concerns the lifelong friendship among three men (George De l’Eur, the scion of an aristocratic British family; William Standish, a stalwart representative of the new American upper classes; and Julius Caesar Snifling, a rapacious mercantile dealer and speculator on the make), but they regard each other with contempt, indifference, and at best an aloof respect. If Hare didn’t keep insisting they are friends, one would have taken for granted that they are enemies.
The first time Espy, Hare, and Redfield are known to have been in the same room together was at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1849. Espy was there to give a technical talk on one of the Smithsonian’s ongoing projects, the correct calibration of barometers. Hare was attending only as an interested spectator. Redfield was there to give the keynote address; he had agreed to be the association’s chairman.
When Redfield came to the podium, he began by acknowledging Espy’s and Hare’s presence in the audience. Then he immediately launched into a long, copiously detailed, and blistering attack on how both Espy and Hare had wrecked America’s progress in science through their overreliance on theory. Since 1830, he said, when he had first described his model of whirlwind storms to Professor Olmsted, there had essentially been no progress at all in the study of meteorology, and he blamed Espy and Hare for the stalemate. This was nothing he hadn’t said in print many times before, but this was the first time he’d ever made the claim in a public forum, when his
antagonists were there and could reply to his face.
Hare rose to accept the challenge. He wasn’t a scheduled speaker; he addressed the gathering from his seat in the audience. He said he wanted to have on record his own complete disgust with what had happened to American science over the course of his career. He need look no further than Redfield’s presence on the podium as chairman; in itself that demonstrated the decline in scientific standards. Redfield’s ideas about storms, as he had repeatedly shown, weren’t science at all; they were simply nonsense. Large bodies of turning air couldn’t cohere or sustain themselves, because they had neither “a restraining vessel” nor a “stirrer.” He denounced Redfield’s current campaign to get his directives for navigation in hurricanes accepted by maritime reference books. All Redfield was doing, Hare said, was “spreading poison.”
Then Hare turned to Espy. Hare declared that he had done everything he could for the past twenty years to explain to Espy that his theory of caloric rarefaction (or convection, as he himself preferred to call it) simply didn’t work. But it had done no good. Espy was incapable of acknowledging his mistakes. It was a defect of his character, compounded by the undeserved praise he’d received from allegedly authoritative institutions like the French academy. Hare said it was fundamentally dishonorable and unpatriotic for Espy to keep bringing up the French academy anyway; Espy would never be a good American or a true scientist until he freed himself from the “intellectual tyranny” of the Europeans.