Now the stage was set for catastrophe. An obscure winter storm blew its way across Europe without anything happening until its southern center crossed the Black Sea, on November 14. Suddenly, as secondaries often do, it came to life. There was rain turning to snow as the disturbance burst forth in gales of hurricane force. The congestion grew while the signs of the storm intensified. The ghostly mountains around Balaclava disappeared in the gloom, the near-by shore lines next were blotted out, and impenetrable darkness settled down on the shuddering and grinding of the battered remnants of the helpless fleet. Wreckage was strewn along the coast and around the harbor. All the men-of-war survived, although damaged, but nearly all of the vessels with essential stores were lost. Misery, disease, and horror followed during the bitter winter. The death rate in the hospitals reached forty-two per cent in February. Meanwhile, in France, Napoleon III received news of the terrible gales at Balaclava and brooded over the catastrophe. He determined to learn where this deadly storm had originated, the path it followed, and to set up a plan for tracking and predicting others of its kind in the future. And so he called in the famous astronomer Leverrier and asked him to carry out the investigation. Urbain Leverrier, then forty-three years old, was known throughout the world as the discoverer of the planet Neptune, in 1846. He knew of the works of Redfield and Reid on hurricanes and by 1854 had noted the efforts of other Americans and Britishers to track extratropical storms. With their ideas in mind, he called on scientists in all European countries to send him observations of the weather on the days from November 12 to 16, preceding and following the day of the disaster at Balaclava. Information moved slowly between countries in those days and, though many scientists co-operated, it was February, 1855, before Leverrier had gathered the data he needed. In developing his plan, he was encouraged by the invention and spread of the electric telegraph in the United States, and he hoped that the extension of lines in Europe would provide fast-moving messages for his purpose. Before the end of February, Leverrier handed his report to Napoleon III and recommended that a system of weather messages and of issuing warnings be established at once. The Emperor approved this within twenty-four hours. Soon the French government was mapping the weather and looking for storms. The British followed suit. Already Joseph Henry, in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, was trying a similar plan, but it was not until February, 1870, that the Congress of the United States appropriated funds and established a government weather service in the Signal Corps of the Army.