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storm's path. And it became clear that although at certain places the winds had been driving in from the north, those same northerly winds felled trees in southerly counties before they did their damage in the more northerly ones. That was Redfield's major eureka moment. The only explanation possible was that the storm was, in essence, a giant whirlwind. His conclusions, called "On the Prevailing Storms of the Atlantic Coast," were published in the American fournal of Science. He didn't call these storms cyclones—that term, derived from the Greek word meaning a coiled snake, was invented some time later by an Englishman, Henry Piddington, who applied Redfield's data to the massive storms in the Bay of Bengal. Nevertheless, the circular nature of the storms was conclusively established. Redfield's data also showed that cyclonic winds move in spirals, and not in concentric circles, that the velocity of rotation— the sustained winds—increases from the fringes toward the center, and that at the same time the whole body of the storm is itself moving, at a speed far less than that of the rotational winds.

Many other scientists, such as Elias Loomis of Cleveland and James Pollard Espy of Philadelphia, later confirmed Redfield's data. Espy, who in 1842 was a professor at the Franklin Institute, became the first official U.S. meteorologist. It was Espy who contributed the final piece of the puzzle of great storms: the notion of rising air and latent heat. He proved that when moist, warm, rising air cools and precipitates out, it releases heat, for the curious but simple reason that molecules of water contain less energy than molecules of vapor. It is this latent heat that reheats the cooling air, causing it to rise farther, thereby drawing more air up after it; it is the key to the self-sustaining nature of tropical cyclones, and an explanation of their awesome power—they are self-generating furnaces and continue to exist as long as a supply of fuel, warm and moist air, can be found at the surface.

The practical men and the natural philosophers had at last come together, being described for the first time in the nineteenth century by the new word scientist. One of these new scientists was Matthew Fontaine Maury, born in 1806 in Virginia, who joined the navy and within a few years had made three voyages, to Europe, around the world, and to the Pacific coast of South America. He then spent the years 1834 to 1841 producing voluminous works on sea navigation and plotting the best paths for sea voyages. His best known work, Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts, contained chapters on the atmosphere, on "red fogs and sea dust," on the winds, and on matters as diverse as the equatorial cloud ring, the salts of the sea, the ocean currents, the Gulf Stream, the influence of the currents on climate, the depths of the ocean, the Atlantic Basin, and on gales, typhoons, and tornadoes. In 1842 he was appointed superintendent of the Depot of Charts and Instruments for the U.S. Navy, where he developed a system for recording the oceanographic and atmospheric data provided by both naval and merchant marine captains, and published the results in 1855, in his The Physical Geography of the Sea, the first real textbook of modern oceanography. One sea captain reported that he had followed Maury's instructions and had cut the duration of a voyage from New York to Rio from forty-one to twenty-four days, and it wasn't long before marine merchants insisted that their skippers use the new scientific navigation techniques too. Maury resigned from the US. Navy when Virginia seceded from the Union, and became commander of the navy of the Confederate States.

In a curious byway of science history, Maury has more recently been adopted by the woollier fringes of the Christian far right, who have come to believe, erroneously, that he was prompted to discover the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents through interpretation of a biblical passage on the "paths of the sea." In fact Ponce de Leon had written about the Florida current