Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
“Dear Fellow Co-ops”
Ironically, just as the SSA was narrowing its outreach to target professional
engineers, the Weather Bureau was expanding its own network of volun-
teer observers. Meteorology had proven its value for aviation in World War
One,
102
but its practitioners found themselves hesitating between two di-
vergent courses at war's end. Historians typically see the war as a watershed
for technocracy, as military, industrial, and economic questions were rede-
fined as problems for scientific experts. One sign of the growing political
authority of scientists was the founding, in 1916, of the national Research
Council, which directed postwar efforts to organize large-scale, collabora-
tive research—including Harry Wood's efforts on behalf of seismology in
California.
103
Yet even the nRC was aware, for its part, that future scientific
funding was largely at the mercy of the public. Voters would have to be con-
vinced that “pure” research was the key to military and industrial advance.
In this sense, the war also pointed American science in a second direction,
toward public outreach.
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the American Meteorological Society was founded in 1919 specifically
as a means of outreach. As the AMS's first
Bulletin
explained, the “exten-
sion of meteorological knowledge and its applications require cooperation
between amateur and professional meteorologists on the one hand, and
teachers, business and professional meteorologists on the other hand.” the
AMS could soon count an eclectic membership of six hundred, about half
of whom were either amateur or professional meteorologists, with the rest
drawn from a variety of other occupations. the society planned to reach an
even wider audience through “educational work,” newspapers, trade jour-
nals, and direct mail. Laypeople would be encouraged to form committees
that “might cooperate with the Weather Bureau . . . in gathering data and
pursuing original lines of investigation.”
105
For its part, the Weather Bu-
reau recognized the AMS as a valuable tool for recruiting new cooperative
observers and facilitating communication between them and professional
meteorologists. In 1922 the
Bulletin
introduced a “Co-operative Observers'
Department for Voluntary Weather Observers in the Americas.”
106
It con-
tained a letter from one Cola W. Shepard in Colony, Wyoming, addressed
“Dear Fellow Co-ops”:
For many years we have been contributing our little mites toward the ad-
vancement of meteorological knowledge by accumulating daily records of
the weather, you in your small corner, and I in mine. Like soldiers in the
