Rain Page 10
The archetypal weatherman with his authority and verve was born not of TV, but of radio. One of the classics was Jimmie Fidler, still a student at Ball State University when he became “Radio’s Original Weatherman” at WLBC in Muncie, Indiana. His show opened like this:
By telephone, telegraph, teletype, radio and the mail, WLBC’s own meteorologist, Jimmie Fidler, “Radio’s original weatherman,” gathers the information on the weather as it is and as it is to be. Now, here is Jimmie with his maze of weather data that he will unravel into a simple and complete picture of the weather.
When a handful of experimental television stations began broadcasting in the early 1940s, Fidler signed on with Cincinnati’s WNBT, where he maintained his persona—trusty purveyor of “authentic weather information”—as TV’s first weatherman. Other early approaches to TV weather hinted at the oddball art to come. New York City’s first television weathercast debuted on October 14, 1941, and starred an animated sheep. Wooly Lamb, sponsored by Botany Wrinkle-Proof Ties, introduced each segment with a song: “It’s hot, it’s cold. It’s rain. It’s fair. It’s all mixed up together. But I, as Botany’s Wooly Lamb, predict tomorrow’s weather.” The meteorologist Robert Henson, author of several books about weather and two on the history of broadcast meteorology, calls Wooly the “harbinger of weather’s eventual segregation from other television news.”
Wooly remained on air for an astonishing seven years, but the early days of TV weather forecasting were mostly somber and serious. Many of the first broadcasters were World War II veterans who parlayed their meteorological skills into jobs in the nascent TV field.
The Federal Communications Commission inadvertently encouraged cheeseball TV weather in 1952 when it opened up competition for local station licenses. Most major cities went from one station to two or three. News managers vying for audience share found weather was the easiest news to liven up. “The result was TV weather’s wildest and most uninhibited period,” Henson writes, “the age of puppets, costumes, and ‘weathergirls.’ ”
The Nashville poet-forecaster Bill Williams gave the weather in verse: “Rain today and rain tonight / Tomorrow still more rain in sight.” In St. Louis, a puppet “weather lion” gave the nightly forecast. In New York, a sleepy bombshell in a short nightie gave the midnight forecast as she tucked herself into bed.
Weary of the indignities of fatuous forecasting, the American Meteorological Society tried to rein it in with a system of credentialing. “Many TV ‘weathermen’ make a caricature of what is essentially a serious and scientific occupation,” the physics professor and Philadelphia weathercaster Francis Davis complained in a 1955 TV Guide piece, “Weather Is No Laughing Matter.”
David Letterman didn’t get the memo. Broadcasting the weather at his hometown station WLWI in Indianapolis out of college, Letterman “joked about ‘hailstones the size of canned hams,’ ” Henson writes, “cited statistics for made-up cities, and once congratulated a tropical storm for reaching hurricane status.”
Numerous stations hired meteorologists in the 1960s, but buffoonery—or beauty—continued to trump credentials. Before she became a movie star and sex symbol, Raquel Welch got her start doing morning weather in San Diego as Raquel Tejada, KFMB’s “Sun-Up Weather Girl.” The accomplished ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer landed her first job out of Wellesley in 1967 as “weathergirl” for her hometown TV station, Louisville, Kentucky’s WLKY. Besides her lack of meteorology experience, Sawyer recounts how she wasn’t allowed to wear her glasses on camera despite terrible eyesight. She couldn’t tell whether she was pointing to the West or East Coast on the weather map.
Meteorologists would put up with many more years of gimmicks before weathercasting became serious again. On NBC’s Today show, Willard Scott delivered the weather dressed up as Carmen Miranda. “A trained gorilla could do this job every night,” Scott once said of the forecaster’s job. A very large gorilla, indeed, was about to change the profession.
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With a wide smile and an even wider tie, John Coleman was the consummate 1970s weatherman, combining serious tweed-jacket forecasting with showmanship. Good Morning America launched in 1975 with Coleman as weather anchor. Breakfast tables tuned to him for seven years, and then his weather-broadcast dream came true.
Coleman believed the short time devoted to weather on TV—typically fifteen minutes a day—was inadequate for what viewers wanted and modern life demanded. He dreamed of a twenty-four-hour national cable network devoted exclusively to the weather. He spent every moment away from his day job developing the concept, figuring out how to program and staff an all-weather channel, and flying around the nation in search of a deep-pocketed financial partner. The partner would turn out to be Frank Batten, who had inherited a regional newspaper company, Landmark Communications, and turned it into one of the largest privately held media conglomerates in the nation.
Venture capitalists were skeptical of Coleman’s plan. Batten could see what they could not. That’s because he had been gobsmacked by weather since age six, when he and his uncle rode out a ferocious Category 4 storm, the Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane of 1933, in the family’s oceanfront cottage on Virginia Beach.
Coleman had many ingenious innovations. One was the proprietary technology to fit local forecasts and weather alerts into national programming. He insisted that all Weather Channel forecasters be trained meteorologists. And he convinced the National Weather Service to become the prominent source of information for the channel. For years, federal meteorologists felt bitter as the on-air TV personalities earned fame using their forecasts and data without attribution. TV broadcasters also might fail to report a warning or overhype one. The Weather Channel and National Weather Service struck a deal that got every warning issued by NWS out to viewers. It would be the greatest visibility government meteorologists ever had.
The Weather Channel launched on May 2, 1982, and rode out stormy years. The early technology garbled the local forecasts. Critics dismissed the channel as a joke. Coleman was a genius weather broadcaster but did not impress as CEO. Landmark invested $32 million to start the channel, and through ’82 and ’83 lost $850,000 a month. The company tried to push Coleman out, he fought back, and a rough legal battled resulted in a settlement that felt like a lose-lose.
By summer 1983, the board was preparing to shut down the channel. Viewership was so small that Nielsen barely registered it. Even if they didn’t sit around watching it, though, Americans liked having the Weather Channel, and the nation’s cable operators knew it. In the end, the operators saved the channel by agreeing to subscriber fees to keep it afloat. Starting in 1984, the fees coincided with the huge wave of growth in cable TV through the mid-1990s. The channel also found revenue in cheesy infomercials: “Heat-wave alert” for Gatorade, “Cold-wave alert” for Quaker Oats, and “Weather and Your Health”—sponsored with no apparent irony by the fake bacon condiment Bac-Os.
The Weather Channel broke even after five years but continued to struggle with tiny ratings. The lack of pizzazz became obvious only in hindsight. Coleman had a strict “no remote feeds” policy—no live broadcasts from the field—because the technology was notoriously poor and expensive. The idea was for the forecasters to stay inside—and give viewers the weather information they needed to go outside.
As video equipment became better and cheaper, the channel’s meteorologists began flipping this formula: They got out in the rain, while viewers stayed dry on their living room couches. It proved an incredibly appealing role reversal. Reporting from the field was a “sea change in our understanding of the emotional connection” people have with weather, said then-CEO Deborah Wilson. The macho meteorologist Jim Cantore cherishes his personal turning point. He’d been stuck behind a desk at the Weather Channel ever since he graduated from college in 1986, talking in front of weather maps. As Hurricane Andrew, Category 5, bore down in August 1992, a producer stretched thin for live feeds with other staffers in Miami asked Cantore if he’
d like to pack a bag and cover Andrew’s second landing in Louisiana.
Reporting on the weakened hurricane from his Baton Rouge hotel with the window smashed and the rain gusting in, Cantore expressed a love for storm drama that infected viewers. “It was awesome, the wind and the rain,” Cantore says. “It wasn’t a huge impact for Louisiana as it was for Florida, but it was awesome. It was my first one.”
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The Weather Channel streamed into the homes of 50 million Americans during Andrew; soon it was 100 million. In 2008, NBC and a pair of private-equity firms bought the channel for $3.5 billion. The man with the twenty-four-hour weather dreams didn’t see a penny. Coleman’s settlement with the company had required him to turn over his 75,000 shares of stock, and since the Weather Channel was insolvent at the time, he received nothing.
Coleman landed as the local weatherman at KUSI-TV in San Diego, where his career took a surprising turn for someone who had devoted his life to explaining the atmosphere. In his seventies, he became an outspoken skeptic of human-caused climate change, using his platform to debunk science on the air, in local speeches, and on Fox News. He called global warming “the greatest scam in history.” He joined an estimated quarter of television meteorologists, who, faced with the difficulty of forecasting tomorrow’s weather, disputed the ability of climate scientists to make predictions fifty and a hundred years out. Wheel of Fortune’s host Pat Sajak, who began his television career as TV weatherman for KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, also turned in old age to spinning doubt about climate change.
Of course, climate scientists don’t claim to predict the daily rainfall in fifty years, but the change in climatic conditions, a distinction that most meteorologists respect. Scientists and writers have come up with many good metaphors for the difference between climate and weather, such as the idea that climate is all the clothes in our closet, weather the outfit that we wear on a particular day. Or climate is what you expect—weather is what you get. (This and many other weather witticisms are often falsely attributed to Mark Twain. While Twain had many clever thoughts on weather, he did not conceive every atmospheric aphorism of human history.) My favorite analogy for climate and weather sees climate as the personality and weather as the mood. So weather is the mood of the atmosphere on any given day, in a specific place. Climate is the atmosphere’s true personality—the average of these weather moods over many years.
I looked up Alan Sealls, chief meteorologist at WKRG in Mobile, Alabama, so that I could interview a weather broadcaster in the rainiest metro area in the United States. We made arrangements to chat about what it’s like to forecast in a city with 100 percent chance of rain all summer long. But global warming and its impact on rainfall had become such a big story that we ended up talking mostly about climate change. In 2009, Sealls won a science-reporting award from the American Meteorological Society for his extensive series, “The Truth About Global Warming,” during a time when most of his colleagues around the nation considered the topic “Kryptonite,” in the words of one. Sealls has become a trusted voice on climate change and the human influence—even in a skeptical state. He stands at the crossroads of another profound shift in the profession. He is the best of the old weathermen, with a huge smile and personality to match; the best of the broadcast scientists, with a master’s in meteorology; and the best of a new kind of weather watcher, helping the public understand one of the most complicated and urgent stories of our time.
He talks to his viewers about the long-term climate—at the same time he advises them to pack a raincoat today.
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* Author of a lovely book called The Cloudspotter’s Guide, Pretor-Pinney is also founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society: cloudappreciationsociety.org.
FIVE
THE ARTICLES OF RAIN
In his 1615 memoir of the native people of Mexico, the historian Fray Juan de Torquemada described an ingenious local skill, one his men wished they could take home to Spain. The natives knew how to make rainproof garments. They tapped a milky sap from tall trees growing in the southern jungles, brewed the liquid over a fire, dipped in their capes and other clothes, then hung them to dry to a protective stiffness. They also plunged their feet in a batch to create a mold, then peeled it off, let it harden, and dipped it again and again. The sap shoes were waterproof, tailor-fit, and sturdy as mukluks.
For more than a century before Torquemada, Columbus and other explorers reported delightful bouncing balls made from the same goo, tossed for sport across Mesoamerica and South America. A century after, in a 1736 expedition to try to measure the curvature of Earth, a Frenchman and friend of Voltaire, Charles de la Condamine, sent a package of the sticky sap from Ecuador to the Paris Academy of Science. His exhaustive report included the native name: caoutchouc, from the Indian caa ouchu, “the tree that weeps.” Condamine called the sap latex, the Latin word for a liquid or fluid. He carefully described the natives’ method for boiling and smoking it into a pliable solid. But most of the scientists who bothered to examine the stuff found it a mere curiosity, useful only for rubbing out pencil marks—which gave it the name that would stick: rubber.
Condamine’s Earth-measuring partner, the French botanist François Fresneau, was convinced the heart of the caoutchouc tree grew a miracle for man. He stayed on in South America to learn all he could about rubber, and devoted his career to figuring out its industrial uses. But neither he nor some of the best scientific minds of the eighteenth century could replicate the waterproofing techniques of the natives, whose patient boiling and smoking, Fresneau wrote to Condamine, “can only be executed on the spots where the tree grows, as these juices soon lose their fluidity.”
Given the devastating rains of the Little Ice Age, the notorious storms of the North Sea, and the cultural fixation on rain in the British Isles, it’s hard to believe westerners were well into the nineteenth century before they figured out how to rainproof themselves: rubberizing coats, cloaks, and carriage tops, and opening up umbrellas. Even then, it was all a remarkably tough sell. Shortly before he died, Fresneau figured out rubber was soluble in turpentine. But the early attempts to use it for waterproofing proved disastrous. Materials coated with the unwieldy brew melted in hot temperatures and cracked in the cold. Manufacturers didn’t want to have anything to do with such products, which also smelled…well, like burning rubber.
By 1800, the single clever use of rubber was still rubbing out pencil.
One day in 1819, a British inventor named Thomas Hancock was cursing a batch of rubber and turpentine as he tried to fashion waterproof roofs for horse-drawn carriages. He botched the batch, a fortunate mistake. He ended up with elastic, which he patented the following year, for attachment “to the wrists of gloves; to waistcoat backs and waist-bands; to pockets, to prevent their being picked.”
Hancock had a mind for mechanics but little aptitude for chemistry. Hard as he tried and close as he got, he could not quite figure out how to make waterproof fabric, which he desperately wanted to manufacture the beautiful rainproof “articles” he’d sketched in his journals: coats and cloaks, sea hoods and fishing boots. Solving the puzzle would take someone with a preternatural grasp of chemicals. While Hancock was breathing turpentine fumes in London, an accomplished chemist in Scotland was a batch closer to the invention that would make his name synonymous with the raincoat—far beyond his imagination, his continent, and his time.
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Charles Macintosh was born in 1766 in Glasgow, where his father was a prosperous merchant and dye maker. The hardscrabble tobacco port was just starting its climb as Scotland’s industrial powerhouse. Glasgow was the major European entry point for raw American tobacco until the colonies won their independence and the trade collapsed, taking the burgh’s economy with it. Cotton, coal, and chemicals all helped restore the tobacco wealth and more. Water-powered cotton mills were rising on the gritty banks of the River Clyde; in 1795 Glasgow had a dozen and by 1839 there were nearly one hundred.
Young
Macintosh went away to school in England and returned home for apprenticeship in a counting house. He was supposed to learn mercantile affairs and help sell his father’s goods, but his mind was captivated by chemistry. The new scientific discipline was just coming into its own, out of the miasma and superstition of alchemy. Macintosh had an ether-clear native talent for mixing and morphing its elements. At eighteen, he was corresponding with the well-known chemists—most then were physicians—of Scotland and England, inquiring about chemistry lectures and how he might make colors from vegetables. He began traveling to Edinburgh to study with Joseph Black, a medical professor who had discovered “fixed air,” soon called carbon dioxide. Black, with Macintosh and some other students, formed the earliest-known chemical society. Before Macintosh turned twenty he had written society papers on alcohol, alum, crystallization, and “the application of the blue colouring matter of vegetable bodies.”
He was not yet twenty-one when he quit the counting house to set up his own plant to manufacture sal ammoniac, a crystalline salt in high demand to make everything from tinned copper to pharmacy cures. Macintosh had secret sources for his salt: he extracted it from soot and urine. Human waste was easy to come by in the city now becoming crushed with poor immigrants fleeing potato famine in the Highlands or evicted from their farms in Scotland’s forced displacements known as the Clearances. For many years, Macintosh’s father had paid for pee. The poor would save up the family’s urine and hand it over to landlords when it came time for pickup by George Macintosh’s collectors. The elder Macintosh used the ammonia to manufacture cudbear, a coveted red-purple dye made from lichens.