Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [30]
Chief Harrington gave him a chance to prove it. In September 1893, Harrington launched a competition, open to all, to find the best forecasters in the Weather Bureau. The grand prize was a coveted professor’s position in Washington. The first step required contestants to write a paper, three thousand words or less, on the topic “Weather Forecasts and How to Improve Them” and to submit this by December 1, 1893. Each contestant was to mail his paper under a false name to avoid prejudicing the three-man panel of judges, but seal his real name inside an attached envelope. Harrington received thirty entries. One came from Isaac. But Joseph, still an apprentice weatherman and nine years Isaac’s junior, also submitted an entry. The rivalry intensified.
THE THREE JUDGES in Harrington’s contest selected the ten best papers and invited their authors to Washington for the next phase of the competition, in which the finalists would take a written examination and spend two weeks testing their forecasting skills against those of their fellow contestants.
Harrington sent two letters to Galveston. The first arrived Christmas Day and informed Isaac that he had placed among the top ten; the second told Joseph he had failed to make the cut.
The Galveston News applauded Isaac. “While those interested in the weather service work in Texas wish him success they would regret to see him called to other fields of duty, as his place here would be a hard one to fill.” The News made no mention of Joseph.
Early in January 1894, Isaac went to Washington. He placed fifth in the final competition, but insisted his grade was only “three-tenths of one per cent behind the winners.” Two other contestants tied for first, one a balding, mustached man named Willis L. Moore, with whom Isaac developed a warm personal friendship. Moore and his opponent entered a runoff competition. Moore won, and received the Washington professorship.
Joseph clearly felt hurt by his failure to place among the top ten finalists. He believed himself to be the best forecaster in the Weather Bureau and for proof cited the fact his name was first on all but one of the lists put out every six months by the bureau’s forecast verification unit, which checked each prediction for accuracy. In a later memoir, he never mentioned that Isaac also had taken the test. In fact, in all 251 pages Joseph barely mentioned Isaac at all, and then only in the most cursory way.
It was geneology, by then. Not love.
THE YEAR 1894 brought Isaac a third daughter, Esther Bellew, his baby. There was a bit of good news, too, for the Weather Bureau. Police at last caught up with Captain Howgate, the fugitive embezzler. It was about the only good news, however. Conflict continued to embroil the bureau. It faced a nation of skeptics, one of the most ardent being Secretary of Agriculture J. Sterling Morton, Harrington’s boss.
Morton wanted to save money and did not think he was getting full value from the bureau’s scientists, whom he believed to be far too well paid for the little skill they demonstrated in forecasting the weather. The previous year he had launched an attack on Cleveland Abbe. In singling out the bureau’s brightest light, it was clear Morton was attacking the bureau as a whole.
Morton’s assault began on June 16, 1893, when he wrote to Abbe asking him to prove his worth. “It seems to me that the disbursements of the Weather Bureau for scientists are altogether too extravagant.”
To Abbe, this was a jolt. In a reply drafted the next day, Abbe wrote, “Nearly every real advance in the progress of the Weather Bureau since I entered it, January 3, 1871, has gone through the three following steps, viz., first I have suggested and urged it; next I started the work and showed how it ought to be done; finally I found the best man, or organized a system, by which the work should be carried on as a permanent feature.”
Morton, unmoved, demanded that Abbe send him proof of all these