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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: First weather forecast offered in The Times (4/9/1860)
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2024 22:47:09 +1200
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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(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