Redfield was mapping storms after 1830, but he was not trying to make weather forecasts. He wanted only to learn about hurricanes in order to give the mariner a law of storms by which he could judge the weather for himself. Nobody worried about the landlubber. It was the idea in those days that a man on land could get his weather out of an almanac or by watching the signs of the winds, clouds, birds, stars, or the rise and fall of the barometer. Scientists who believed that it would be possible to predict the ordinary changes in the weather were decidedly in the minority. One of these was James Pollard Espy, who became known as the “Old Storm King” of America. James Espy was born in Pennsylvania, in the vicinity of Harrisburg, but his father moved the family to Kentucky while James was an infant. It has been said in biographies of Espy that the boy had no education and was seventeen years old before he learned to read, but this was denied by relatives who survived him. It seems that the elder Espy soon went to the Miami Valley in Ohio, to get established in business, and left James with an older sister in Kentucky. At eighteen James registered at Transylvania University, in Lexington, where he was much interested in science. In any event, at various times he was a schoolteacher in Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, until he became fully occupied in the study of weather. In 1820, Espy joined the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, to teach languages and work on the weather. In an amazingly short time, he became an authority on meteorology. He was a pleasant, easygoing man, but very persistent in two matters. First, he was determined to have a government bureau established to predict storms; and, second, he disagreed with Redfield in the latter’s whirlwind theory of hurricanes. At times the two carried on a violent controversy in the press. Espy argued that the winds blow directly toward the center of a storm or toward a line through the center. He was right with respect to storms of middle and higher latitudes, as everybody knows today. He anticipated the modern idea of fronts, and he and other scientists of his day sometimes referred to these lines as “like a line of battle.” In a way, Redfield also was right, for the typical hurricane in the tropics has no fronts. In his efforts to set up a government weather bureau, Espy was successful in a small way. In 1842, he was appointed by Congress for five years as “Meteorologist to the U. S. Government” and assigned to the Surgeon General, where he worked for five years. This rather strange appointment was due to the fact that the Surgeon General had been taking weather observations at Army posts since 1819 and had much data for study.