by Lee Sandlin
Hazen backed another small idea that soon became one of the unquestioned givens of American life: standard time. At that point, timekeeping in America was a strictly local affair; each town set its own clock according to its best guess about when twelve noon was. This was gradually becoming a nightmare for the railroads, because as they grew across the country in those years, their schedules were turning into a hopeless maze of incomplete overlaps and partial synchronizations. (One estimate around 1880 was that American railroads were using fifty different clock times.) With the enthusiastic public support of Hazen and the Signal Corps, a set of four standardized clock times, staggered across the country, was adopted by the railroads and the telegraph companies in 1883. Within a few years most of the country was using it, and by 1918 it had become a federal law.
Finley’s field report on his Kansas expedition took him months to finish. The basic template for a corps field report was simple: go to the disaster site, interview witnesses and survivors, and reconstruct as closely as possible a chronology of the event. The officer was expected to stick to the facts and hold off on any theories or speculations. Finley did his best to follow the rules. But his report was unusual. The level of detail was unprecedented, even obsessive. He wasn’t content to record the facts of the tornado damage; he cataloged them through a microscope. Where a typical officer might write that he had seen “debris” at one site, Finley wrote: “The creek to the SE of the house was choked up with a mixture of straw, rags, feathers, kitchen utensils, rails, boards, and pieces of farming implements.” At another site he noted: “Lightning rods and wire fencing were wound into balls or twisted into ropes; tinware, cutlery, stove-pipes, harnesses, and furniture were broken and twisted in every conceivable manner.”
As a result, Finley’s report ran a hundred pages when the average report rarely went more than twenty. Finley also made room to talk about his own difficulties and shortcomings—something he would routinely do in his writings from then on. His report, he wrote, should have been much longer, but the horrendous working conditions, the impossibility of doing a thorough investigation of every tornado site, and the limited amount of time he’d been given to write up his findings had all forced him to cut his work short.
Nor could he forgo the opportunity to make recommendations. This was a brash, even arrogant move for a junior staffer who had no business expressing any opinion on Signal Corps policy. But Finley couldn’t help offering a number of general observations about tornadoes and meteorological theory and suggesting several ways in which the Signal Corps could improve its methods of research. He urged most particularly that each spring the Signal Corps assign a special observer to the frontier; he even recommended where the observer should be based: Kansas City. The observer’s goal should be to travel to tornado sites as quickly as possible so that the evidence would still be fresh. The goal should be to amass enough data to make tornado forecasts. The necessity for the forecasts, Finley observed, should be self-evident: after all, the Kansas tornado outbreak took place in one of the most sparsely settled areas of the country, and yet his estimate was that forty-two people had been killed and several hundred injured.
Finley ought to have expected a reprimand from his commanding officer, Hazen, for exceeding his brief. But he had a patron in the G Street office: Cleveland Abbe. Abbe was tremendously impressed by Finley’s report, including the recommendations, and he talked it up to Hazen. Hazen agreed to let Abbe give Finley a new assignment. Search through the old archives, Abbe told Finley, and see how many accounts of tornadoes you can find. See if anything can be made out of them. At the least, get a sense for how often tornadoes really occur.
Finley was still expected to keep up with his regular duties for Abbe in the Fact Room. He spent much of his days preparing data for inclusion in the Signal Corps’s regular publications, the Weekly Weather Chronicle and the Monthly Weather Review. But the rest of the time he was relentlessly burrowing through the archives. He read through the old weather logs kept by medical officers. He looked at the handfuls of surviving spotters’ reports from Espy’s day that had been salvaged from the disastrous 1865 fire at the Smithsonian. He went to the Library of Congress and read back issues of newspapers. Anytime he found a description of a tornado, he broke it down into quantifiable data—date, time of day, direction, speed, duration, fatalities.
He had a starting point for his own work, supplied to him by Abbe. This was a tentative list of American tornadoes that had been prepared years earlier by the Yale professor Elias Loomis, author of A Treatise on Meteorology. Loomis had recorded all the data he could scavenge for every tornado he’d heard about in the early years of the Republic. There were sixteen tornadoes in all.
Finley’s list took him almost two years to put together. Its chronology began in 1794 and ended in 1881. Finley had cataloged every substantial account of tornadoes he could find and made a first assessment of their typical behavior. The title of the report was “Characteristics of Six Hundred Tornadoes.”
Abbe realized that he had found his tornado expert. He wanted the report published immediately, but there were problems. Finley had poured so much exhausting labor into the research, had put in so much overtime, and had been so insistent on doing all the transcribing and copyediting himself that the final result was swarmed by countless tiny errors. Publication in its present form was impossible. What made the situation more difficult was that Finley grew overbearing and defensive whenever he was criticized. Abbe decided to delay publication until somebody could discreetly complete a corrected text. The job ended up taking another two years.
In the meantime, Abbe passed the draft on to General Hazen. Hazen was even more impressed by it than Abbe was—so impressed that he immediately promoted Finley to sergeant. He also found the report rather alarming; he’d had no idea that tornadoes occurred so frequently in the Great American Desert, even though he’d been stationed there himself during the Indian Wars. He decided at once that the corps should take a more active role in the investigation of tornadoes. He went back to Finley’s recommendations in his field report from Irving, Kansas, and talked them over with Abbe. He agreed to have a man on extended assignment in the prairies during the spring and early summer; Finley’s report had established that this was when tornadoes were most frequent. The only possible choice for the job was Finley.
Finley spent the spring of 1882 based in Kansas City. It was an active season: in early April, a large and powerful storm system crossed through the plains, with heavy winds and rain, severe hailstorms (the hail, which broke windows throughout central Kansas, was reported to be the size of hen’s eggs), and multiple tornado touchdowns. One tornado destroyed all but two buildings out of eighty in the small town of Stafford, Kansas. Later that spring a tornado hit Phillipsburg, Kansas: the streets were said to be bathed in a ruby-red glow as the funnel moved into the heart of town. In June a storm spawned a tornado that cut through the outskirts of Kansas City itself; only one person was dead, but houses were described in newspaper accounts as being “crushed like eggshells.” The same storm system the next day spawned a tornado that wrecked Grinnell, Iowa; it was so powerful that it blew trains off railroad tracks. A hundred people in Grinnell were killed.
Finley was kept on the move, visiting tornado scenes and interviewing survivors. But he also went on lengthy tours of his own. He traveled up and down the Missouri and the Mississippi; he toured around the Great Lakes to Michigan; he returned to Missouri and went on out to western Kansas. He visited the local weather stations wherever he went and collected copies of all their reports on tornadoes. He gave talks about tornadoes and the work of the Signal Corps at lodges and at businessmen’s associations and at universities, where he enlisted volunteers to act as “tornado reporters.”
Everywhere he went, he asked people to tell him their tornado stories. He was rarely disappointed. It seemed as though every city and small town in the plains and the Mississippi valley had been struck by a tornado. They called it a Texa
s twister or a Kansas cyclone. It might have happened the previous spring; it might have been forty years earlier. But everybody could still summon up every detail of that day, and they all wanted to tell it again to Finley. He heard the same thing in Kansas and Missouri and Oklahoma and Iowa and Illinois—the story of the Great Tornado. As often as not it was a tornado he’d never heard of before, but to the people of the town it was invariably the defining event of their lives. They dated everything about their local history by it. Somebody was born, some prominent family arrived or moved away, their beautiful church was built, the local college was opened, “a couple of years before (or after) the Great Tornado.”
Finley meticulously collected their descriptions. It seemed as though no two tornadoes were alike. There were tornadoes like elephant trunks and tornadoes like snakes; there were gigantic tornadoes that calved off and reabsorbed smaller tornadoes, and twin tornadoes that collided and merged into one monstrous funnel, and multiple tornadoes that hung down from their parent clouds like crowds of icicles. Everybody remembered strange lights and glows. Usually, it was a deep ruby-red glow at the heart of the funnel like a demon’s eye; that was the Red Wind of Indian folklore. Other times it was a diffuse, dark, sickly green aura that pervaded the surrounding clouds just before the tornado touched down; “tornado green,” it was called. But other people had seen seethes of yellow and red around the base of the funnel like flames, and blue-white bands of lightning, and still others had seen that from close up the tornado funnel was continually sparkling and flashing up and down its length as though it were made out of diamonds. And then there were the noises the tornadoes had made, bellows and hisses, wails and moans and trumpet calls; it was as though the Indians were right: the tornado was sentient and was trying to get across an incommunicable message.
But there was something else, too: what the tornado had left behind. It was the same wherever Finley went. No matter that the tornado had been decades before, the townspeople could always point to someone who had never gotten over it. Finley recognized that haunted look, that air of perpetual anxiety, that he had seen after the strange twin tornado in Irving, Kansas. It might be a clerk in the law office, or a bustling housewife at the counter of the dry-goods store, or a sunken-cheeked wastrel in a corner of the saloon: they got the same look of blind panic whenever the southwestern sky clouded over.
Finley returned to Washington City at the end of the summer. He immediately threw himself into a round of feverish activity—as though to get everything settled all at once. In September he was furiously writing a copiously detailed new analysis of his tornado researches. In October he was enrolling in intensive seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, one of the first major universities to offer graduate studies in meteorology. In November he got married; his bride was a Washington City society girl named Julia Larkin (Signal Corps officers were considered highly desirable catches).
By December he was in an army mental hospital.
His diagnosis was “premonitory symptoms of neurasthenia.” Neurasthenia was something of a vogue disease in that era. Its symptoms were exhaustion, anxiety, neuralgia, headache, and severe depression. Its cause was prolonged overwork. It was considered an affliction peculiar to the jittery energies of the Gilded Age; the famous psychologist William James suggested renaming it “Americanitis.” Finley’s doctor wrote less grandly that his patient was simply “doing too much brain work.” His prognosis was: “He very decidedly needs rest. Should he continue to do as much as at present the consequences will be of very grave character.”
Finley’s recuperation was slow. Over the winter he was released from the hospital. He went back to his family home in Michigan and spent the spring of 1883 there. But he didn’t find the stay restful. In fact, the longer it lasted, the more anxious he became. His illness, he wrote to a friend then, had caused him “a world of regret.” Not because he had overworked himself to the point where he’d ended up in a mental hospital, but because he was tortured by the thought of all the new developments in his field he was missing out on while he was malingering here in the boondocks. He “trembled,” he wrote, at the thought of how far he was falling behind.
Finley resumed his duties at Fort Myer, in its serene isolation outside Washington City. He instructed the cadets not only in the basics of service in the corps—signaling, telegraphy, and meteorology—but the essentials of fieldwork: the inspection of weather stations, the organization of river stations to report flooding, the strict technical requirements of making daily weather records. The cadets also became practiced at the physical labors required of corpsmen in the field: laying telegraph lines, digging postholes, repairing corroded cables. Sometimes they got such tasks as punishment for curfew violations or drunkenness or other derelictions of duty. This was actually against army regulations; legitimate duties weren’t supposed to be imposed as punishments. But Finley, after serving at Fort Myer as a cadet and as an instructor, thoroughly approved. “An occasional dose of the laborer’s job,” he later wrote, “was good medicine for the recalcitrant Observer.”
Fort Myer was also where General Hazen had placed his Study Room, and it was ideal for its staffers, too. Their job was to think—to think uninterruptedly. They were spared the grind of devising daily forecast maps; that was done in town at the Fact Room. They were free to spend their hours in the Study Room in extended researches without results. The placid setting—the base was on a hilltop, surrounded by great vistas of rolling forested countryside—was an encouragement to contemplation. It was meant to be a soothing alternative to the crammed and squalid streets of Washington City. Nor did it hurt that it seemed worlds away from the tangled, corrupt, patronage-driven labyrinths of the federal government.
When John Finley returned from his medical leave over the summer of 1883, General Hazen greeted him with the news of a promotion. Finley was now second lieutenant. He was also relieved of his scut-work duties in the Fact Room and was now officially in charge of the corps’s tornado research project. That meant a transfer out of G Street to Fort Myer, where he was assigned a desk in the Study Room. He was also given two assistants. The assistants were to read and digest for Finley’s benefit all the reports coming in from his national spotters network. Finley’s job was to devise a formal method of predicting tornadoes.
He fell to the job with a burst of renewed enthusiasm. He reviewed his own fieldwork, he unearthed from the archives all the reports on tornadoes done by Signal Corps officers, and he had endless technical discussions with Abbe and with the other meteorologists in the Study Room. He was soon putting in more time on tornadoes than he had in the months leading up to his breakdown. (He was also spending several hours a day instructing cadets.) He found the subject maddeningly diffuse, but after several months he thought he had the basics within his grasp.
His core assumption was one he and Cleveland Abbe had made years earlier, which they had derived from their reading of William Blasius’s book Storms: tornadoes formed at the meeting between a domain of hot humid air and one of cold dry air. But Finley had gone on to elaborate several further principles from this: for instance, that tornadoes tended to form in the southeast quadrant of low-pressure systems, at places of high contrasts in temperature and dew point. He had also massed enough evidence to confirm many rules of thumb that people had about tornadoes—that they rotated counterclockwise, that they generally appeared in late afternoon, and that they almost always moved from southwest to northeast.
But about other issues he wasn’t so sure. What were conditions like inside the tornado? An idea was going around then, debated in the Study Room and in university science departments, that there had to be an area of near vacuum within the tornado funnel to account for the ferocious rush of inflowing winds. This was not a new idea; Franklin had suspected it, and Sir John Herschel had said as much during the debate over James Espy’s steam-power theory. But it was realized now that the vacuum could account for the tornado’s extraordinary destructiveness: if a funnel p
assed over a house, then the air pressure trapped inside would push outward into the vacuum, causing the house to explode.
Finley always regarded this idea with skepticism. But it proved to have a powerful hold on the imagination of other meteorologists: starting within the next few years, and persisting for more than a century, Weather Bureau officials and other experts would advise people to open their windows when a tornado was approaching in order to equalize the air pressure.
Meanwhile, did Finley have enough data to begin predicting tornadoes? General Hazen tried never to pressure the Study Room into delivering quick results. But the problem of tornadoes became more urgent early in 1884. In the third week of February, the forecasters in the Washington City Fact Room were tracking a large winter storm that was moving across the country. There were blizzards across the Great Lakes and violent thunderstorms in the lower Mississippi valley. On the nineteenth and twentieth, the office began receiving frantic wire messages from weather stations throughout the South. Tornadoes were touching down in waves, in families; at least fifty tornadoes within two days, leaving more than a hundred people dead. Nobody knew where the tornadoes had come from or how there could be so many of them. It became known as the Enigma Outbreak.