Houses were ruined and big trees were blown down. Whole fleets were lost and more than nine thousand seamen were drowned. The most violent winds came at night. Startled by the roar of the storm, Queen Anne got out of bed and found a part of the palace roof had been torn away. One prelate, Bishop Kidder, was buried beneath the ruins of his mansion. Awakened by the giant gusts, he put on his dressing gown and made for the door, but a chimney stack crashed through the ceiling and dashed out his brains. His wife was crushed in her bed. After the gales subsided, London and other cities looked like they had been sacked by an enemy. All over the south of England, the lead roofs of churches were rolled up by the wind or blown away in large sheets.
Though other gales almost as bad as this one came in later years, it was more than a century before the storm hunters made much progress. Not long after 1800, several men with an inquiring mind began to get results. Redfield was one, but he studied hurricanes and not the storms of higher latitudes, such as the one which devastated the British Isles.
Shortly after 1800, there were signs of the coming of faster means of travel and communications and they were destined to be a vital factor in weather forecasting. In 1816 a “hobby-horse” with wheels was displayed in Paris by an inventor named Niepice. It was propelled by a man or two sitting on it and pushing on the ground. Even with two men pushing, it went no faster than a man could walk. But strong claims were made about its possibilities. At about the same time, several men were working on devices like the telegraph.
Whether it was this trend or not, something aroused the intense curiosity of a young professor, William Heinrich Brandes, of the University of Breslau, in Germany. He began a study in 1816, to see if the weather moved from place to place and if it would be possible to send predictions ahead by means then available. Everybody at that time knew that storms moved but it was the general belief that ordinary changes in the weather didn’t go anywhere. Brandes collected newspapers from many places and searched them for remarks about the weather, which he put on maps. Here he was amazed to see that all kinds of weather seemed to be constantly in motion, quite generally from west to east. But the newspaper reports were rather poor for his purposes and he couldn’t be too sure about the rate of travel.