And here we find stories of big four-engined bombers flying into the centers of these furious storms. In these stories we go along. We see what the weather crews saw and learn what they learned. And we see how the hurricane warning service works today—far better than a few years ago—but with a part of the great mystery still unsolved. So we go with the hunters in shaking, plunging planes, from the surface of the sea to the tops of the biggest hurricanes, looking for the final answers to this great puzzle of the centuries. _2._ THE SADDLER’S APPRENTICE “_All violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds._” —Redfield In recent years, when men were first assigned to the alarming duty of flying into hurricanes and they began to study the old records, one question bothered them very much. Why did it take so long to prove without doubt that these big tropical storms are whirlwinds? The main reason, of course, is the huge size of the wind circulation. The winds spiral in such a broad arc around the storm center that there is no noticeable change in the wind direction within a distance of many miles. It was like the curvature of the earth. Any circle around the full body of the earth is so enormous that it seems to be a straight line, and men were deceived for centuries into believing that the earth is flat. The crews of fast modern aircraft can fly through the main part of a hurricane in two or three hours, at most, and they can immediately see changes of the wind as they go along. They have no reason to question it. In earlier times, there was no means of travel fast enough to get the facts in this way. Then, too, there was no means of sending messages fast enough to show what the wind was doing at the same instant in different parts of the storm. Also, the entire wind system was in motion and if the various reports were not sent at the same time, the results, when they were charted, failed to make sense. This fact alone was the cause of much confusion, even as late as the first part of the nineteenth century. A definite answer to the whirlwind question came suddenly and unexpectedly in a most peculiar manner. In the autumn of 1821, a young saddler was walking through the woods of central Connecticut with his inquiring mind on scientific matters of the day when he discovered a strange fact that led to the first “law of storms” and eventually made him the most illustrious of the hurricane hunters. His name was William Redfield. His ideas were first published in 1831 and, together with the work of a few men who followed on his trail, were the mainstay of sailors in stormy weather for nearly a hundred years.