Hey 👋

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a big email.

There was a news story the other day about a slow-down in scientific breakthroughs since the mid 1940s. There are probably reasons for why that is, or why that seems that way (not being able to randomly conduct experiments on prisoners and the mentally ill probably factors in somewhere).

Back in 1882 U.S. Army Sergeant John P. Finley was tasked with a mighty big ask: “Figure out what causes tornadoes and how to forecast them.” Armed with nothing more than a pen and presumably a horse or two, Finley ran around the country as a Civil War-era storm chaser and came back two years later with a list of 15 rules for tornado formation.

His rules were pretty good. They included the presence of a low pressure system, high temperature gradients, increasing humidity from the southeast, the time of year, and wind velocities. He also noted “Tornadoes frequently occur in groups with parallel paths, within a few miles of each other.”

I like to imagine a serious-looking man sitting atop a horse just staring down a tornado, calmly taking notes as his hat blows off at 200 MPH.

Then, for a long time, literally nothing happened.

That’s because the U.S. Army Signal Corps (the precursor to the civilian National Weather Bureau, formed during President Harrison’s administration in 1890) literally banned using the word “tornado”. The ban stuck even during the changeover.

Everyone figured even with Finley’s rules you couldn‘t forecast a tornado’s position with close enough accuracy to warn anyone, and even if you did warn a bunch of people, it would just “incite panic”. In the long tradition of the U.S. Government, it was assumed Americans weren’t smart enough to deal with information.

It wasn’t until 1947 that the newly minted U.S. Air Force had a tornado strike an airbase in Oklahoma that someone thought, “That sucked. Wish we knew when these things were going to happen.” So the air base commander put two men on figuring out how to forecast it. And wouldn’t you know they said, “Sir, we think another tornado is going to strike here this week.”

And one did. A rare occurrence of a tornado striking the same place at nearly the same time literally days apart. Because of the warning, it saved the U.S. Air Force $6 million in estimated damages.

”Huh, guess we can sorta figure this out after all,” was surely someone’s insight. Still, the ban persisted on saying “tornado” in print or on radio or TV.

Until 1949 when a couple of U.S. Air Weather Service weathermen in Oklahoma felt so sure a tornado was eminent near Kansas City, they just flatly ignored the ban at risk to their jobs. They issued the first of what we’d call a “tornado watch”. Schools closed early, people stayed at home, and it saved lives.

Fearing the Air Force and even some local TV and radio stations might leapfrog them, the Weather Bureau got serious about severe storm forecasting and grudgingly lifted the ban on the word “tornado”.

Sometimes discoveries come quickly because low-hanging fruit is right there. And other times a bureaucracy gets in the way to protect us simpletons. And often it’s hard to know which it is.

— Justin

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• ​21 things I learned teaching Photoshop last semester​

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