In 1831, Professor Denison Olmstead of Yale College was traveling by boat from New York to New Haven. A stranger approached him and began talking about some papers the professor had published in the American Journal of Science. The stranger said his name was William C. Redfield. (Actually he had no middle name but used the C for “Convenience,” to keep from being confused with two other William Redfields in the area.) In the course of the conversation, Redfield talked reservedly about his ideas regarding West Indian hurricanes. The professor was amazed and urged him to publish his ideas in the American Journal of Science.
Redfield, who was now forty-two years old, began writing on the law of storms. He wrote well and his ideas were clear and convincingly expressed. A long series of articles followed his first one in the American Journal of Science. During these years he became a famous “hurricane hunter.” He collected reports of West Indian hurricanes—as many as he could get from ships caught in storms and from other sources—and studied them at great length. He inspected the log books of vessels in port, interviewed many shipmasters, and corresponded with others. His urgent purpose was to devise a law of storms and a set of rules to promote the safety of human life and property afloat on the oceans and to afford some measure of protection for the inhabitants of cities and towns on the coasts subjected to destructive visits from these monsters of the tropics.
After the death of Redfield, in 1857, Professor Olmstead summarized his theory of storms as follows:
“That all violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds, in which the wind blows in circuits around an axis; that the winds do not move in horizontal circles but rather in spirals.
“That the direction of revolution is always uniform being from right to left, or against the sun, on the north side of the equator, and from left to right, or with the sun, on the south side of the equator.
“That the velocity of rotation increases from the margin toward the center of the storm. That the whole body of air is, at the same time, moving forward in a path, at a variable rate, but always with a velocity much less than its velocity of rotation.
“That in storms of a particular region, as the gales of the Atlantic or the typhoons of the China Sea, great uniformity exists with regard to the path pursued by these storms. Those of the Atlantic, for example, usually come from the equatorial regions east of the West India islands, moving at first toward the northwest as far as the latitude of 30°, and then gradually wheeling toward the northeast and following a path nearly parallel to the American Coast until they are lost in mid-ocean. That their dimensions are sometimes very great, as much as 1,000 miles in diameter, while their paths over the ocean can sometimes be traced for 3,000 miles.”
These conclusions were in the main correct, but time has proved that there are many exceptions. At any rate, Redfield’s papers became classics. He had demonstrated by collections of observations on shipboard that a tropical storm is an organized rotary wind system and not just a mass of air moving straightaway at high velocities.
It happened that in 1831, the same year in which Redfield’s first paper appeared in the American Journal of Science, there was a terrible hurricane on the island of Barbados. Devastation was so great that the people on the island firmly believed the storm had been accompanied by an earthquake. More than 1,500 lives were lost. Property damage, considering values in that early day, was tremendous for a small island—estimated at more than seven million dollars.
Barbados had suffered so much that England sent Colonel (afterward Brigadier-General) William Reid of the Royal Engineers to superintend the reconstruction of the government buildings. He was appalled by what he saw.