Weather Whys; Benjamin Franklin

This is weather-wise. Certainly one of America's greatest intellectuals was Benjamin Franklin. The good doctor invented a safe stove and bifocal glasses and was the creator of America's postal system. Franklin is known for his electrical experiments and his discovery that the electricity in a thunderstorm was the same kind he could generate in the laboratory. He also made another less well-known discovery, the movement of weather systems. While that movement may seem incredibly obvious to us today, remember there were no satellites or TV weathermen back then to give people the big picture. There were no telephone or telegraph systems, and since it took days for messages to travel from city to city, it probably was not so obvious that storm activity in different places on successive days was part of the same weather system. Like many other great breakthroughs in history, the connection was made by accident. Franklin was looking forward to viewing a lunar eclipse on a certain evening in Philadelphia

and was disappointed when a heavy storm obscured the night sky. Later, he learned the eclipse had been visible in Boston, but that a storm similar to the one he had seen hit Boston later in the night. He realized it was the same storm which had moved northeast from Philadelphia. That discovery was an important piece in the meteorological puzzle, and while scientists may never get it all put together, each piece of that puzzle makes the picture a bit more complete. Weatherwise is a production of the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms at the University of Oklahoma, established in 1989 by the National Science Foundation for research on local and regional prediction of storms. Our writer is Christine Harbour, editor is Brian Walkie and producer Steve Patrick. While weatherwise, I'm Drew Barlow.