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.”