Though other gales almost as bad as this one came in later years, it was more than a century before the storm hunters made much progress. Not long after 1800, several men with an inquiring mind began to get results. Redfield was one, but he studied hurricanes and not the storms of higher latitudes, such as the one which devastated the British Isles. Shortly after 1800, there were signs of the coming of faster means of travel and communications and they were destined to be a vital factor in weather forecasting. In 1816 a “hobby-horse” with wheels was displayed in Paris by an inventor named Niepice. It was propelled by a man or two sitting on it and pushing on the ground. Even with two men pushing, it went no faster than a man could walk. But strong claims were made about its possibilities. At about the same time, several men were working on devices like the telegraph. Whether it was this trend or not, something aroused the intense curiosity of a young professor, William Heinrich Brandes, of the University of Breslau, in Germany. He began a study in 1816, to see if the weather moved from place to place and if it would be possible to send predictions ahead by means then available. Everybody at that time knew that storms moved but it was the general belief that ordinary changes in the weather didn’t go anywhere. Brandes collected newspapers from many places and searched them for remarks about the weather, which he put on maps. Here he was amazed to see that all kinds of weather seemed to be constantly in motion, quite generally from west to east. But the newspaper reports were rather poor for his purposes and he couldn’t be too sure about the rate of travel. Brandes knew that the French had set up weather stations and collected observations for maps as early as 1780, but the terrible French Revolution had brought an end to this work and the data were lying in disuse. After some delay, he obtained copies of the observations for 1783 and put them on maps. Sure enough, after he had drawn many daily maps, he saw clearly how the weather moved just as he had suspected it did from the newspaper reports. But at the same time he saw that it was hopeless. The weather moved so rapidly that there was no way of sending the reports ahead fast enough for making predictions of what was coming. The quickest way of sending the reports ahead was by horse or a good man on foot, and the weather would easily outrun them. In 1820, Brandes wrote an article about weather maps for publication and then put his maps and newspapers in the trash. But in time his idea got around the world and as the years passed more and more scientists began drawing maps and trying to predict the weather. And so it came about that the government weather services in different parts of the world were set up to predict storms of higher latitudes rather than hurricanes.