But Redfield was now past thirty years of age. Because he had not gone very far in school, he did not see how he could undertake to demonstrate these facts about hurricanes to men of scientific learning. He kept turning the idea over in his mind at intervals as the months and years went by. In the meantime, he had become interested in navigation on the Hudson River and had made a reputation as a marine engineer. By 1826, he was superintendent of a line of forty or fifty barges and canal boats. But whenever he read of a bad storm on the coast, he thought about the hurricane of 1821 and the trees thrown down in different directions by the opposing winds of a great whirling storm. In 1831, Professor Denison Olmstead of Yale College was traveling by boat from New York to New Haven. A stranger approached him and began talking about some papers the professor had published in the _American Journal of Science_. The stranger said his name was William C. Redfield. (Actually he had no middle name but used the C for “Convenience,” to keep from being confused with two other William Redfields in the area.) In the course of the conversation, Redfield talked reservedly about his ideas regarding West Indian hurricanes. The professor was amazed and urged him to publish his ideas in the _American Journal of Science_. 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.