A hundred years ago, a Weather Bureau chief explained a new invention that would change everything. Mariners, he said, would now finally be able to see danger coming, "such as the direction of hurricanes, for instance."

He had no way of knowing how soon that sentence would stop being theoretical.

The man behind it wasn't a career meteorologist. Charles Francis Jenkins was born in Richmond, Indiana, and trained at Earlham College before becoming one of the country's most restless inventors.

He already held the Elliott Cresson gold medal from the Franklin Institute for inventing the motion picture machine, and had given the first public exhibition of motion pictures in America back in 1894, in his own hometown.

Once he decided mariners needed to see the actual weather map instead of just hearing a coded forecast, he built the machine in two weeks.

A weather map was wrapped around a revolving glass cylinder with a light inside. As the cylinder turned, that light passed through the map and struck a light-sensitive cell, which converted the pattern of light and dark into an electric current. That current became a radio signal, broadcast from the Navy's station in Arlington.

On the receiving end, incoming signals ran a fountain pen back and forth across paper wrapped on a matching cylinder, tracing the same lines back into existence, dot by dot, hundreds of miles from where the map began. Jenkins put it plainly to reporters: "I have been working on visual radio for ten years."

The first public demonstration sent a full day's weather map from Arlington to the Weather Bureau in Washington in just under forty five minutes. Navy officials were impressed enough that they immediately equipped two vessels, the cruiser Trenton and the transport Kittery, to begin testing the system, one sailing north toward Narragansett Pier, the other south toward the Caribbean, so the system could be proven in both kinds of water.

Weather Bureau chief Charles F. Marvin didn't dress up the pitch. Ships at sea, he said, had been getting weather information too late or not at all. This system would let a captain see conditions building in real time and change course accordingly, specifically naming hurricanes as the example that mattered most.

It wasn't an abstract concern. In September that year, the Great Miami Hurricane tore through South Florida. The final toll: over a thousand dead, two thousand injured, thirty eight thousand people homeless on the east coast alone, and property damage estimated at 125 million dollars.

The USS Kittery, one of the two ships carrying Jenkins' new receivers, used the system to navigate away from the worst of that same storm.

Jenkins' machine wasn't operating alone. By the end of that year, papers were describing an entire international weather network stitching itself together by radio, with a French training ship, the Jacques Cartier, spending five years crisscrossing the Atlantic as a literal floating weather bureau, gathering and relaying reports for mariners on both sides of the ocean.

A Hoosier's two week invention had become one piece of the first real-time weather map of the world.

And I haven’t dug into it, but at first glance, it appears he may have also worked on similar systems for airplanes at the time. For another day…

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources:
The Indianapolis News, August 24, 1926
Times Colonist, October 23, 1926
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 5, 1926
The Courier-Journal, September 20, 1926
Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, November 28, 1926