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From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: First weather forecast offered in The Times (4/9/1860)
Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2024 06:26:43 +0100
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 Ar an ceathrú lá de mí Méan Fómhair, scríobh Ross Clark: 

 > (Well, wiki says 1861.) And all thanks to Robert Fitzroy -- yes, the one who
 > took Charles Darwin along as a travelling companion on the Beagle, and was
 > Governor of New Zealand for a couple of years. By this time he was a Rear
 > Admiral and a member of the Royal Society. in 1854 he was appointed
 > "Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade". He used the telegraph to
 > collect weather reports from all over the country, and started producing what
 > seem at first to have been just "reports" of what the weather had been the
 > previous day in various places. It's not clear from either Crystal or Wiki
 > exactly when the predictive element came in. When it did, the term
 > "weather-cast" was sometimes used, but eventually Fitzroy's preference,
 > "forecast", became standard.
 > 
 > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_FitzRoy

Unsurprising that someone with a naval background did this first. And great
that weather forecasts are currently actually good!

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)