William Ferrel

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William Ferrel

William Ferrel (born January 29, 1817 in Bedford , today Fulton County , Pennsylvania , USA , † September 18, 1891 in Martinsburg , West Virginia ) was an American meteorologist .

Ferrel developed theories that explain planetary circulation and constructed a machine to predict the tides .

Life

Ferrel grew up in very poor circumstances, acquired all of his knowledge as a self-taught and eventually became a school teacher. The observation of a partial solar eclipse in 1832 spurred him on to further studies. In 1837 he had saved enough to begin studying. He graduated in 1844 and then continued to work as a teacher. In 1854 he founded his own school in Nashville Tennessee. After moving to Nashville, he was able to use libraries for the first time. Three years later he was offered a position at the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac in Cambridge, Massachusetts , which he accepted a year later. In 1861 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1868 to the National Academy of Sciences .

From 1867 to 1882 he worked for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey (USCGS), until his retirement in 1886 with the Signal Service.

power

Around 1850 he happened upon a treatise on the tides and discovered that Pierre-Simon Laplace must have made a mistake in his famous treatise on celestial mechanics : the effect of the sun and moon on the tides on earth must slowly slow down the rotation of the earth . (Laplace had not included the effect of friction.) His own work on the subject appeared in the Astronomical Journal in 1853 .

In 1856 his article An essay on the winds and currents of the ocean appeared , in which he was the first to provide a plausible explanation for the wind circulation in the middle latitudes of the earth. In 1858 he published the article The influence of the Earth's rotation upon the relative motion of bodies near its surface ; Here he stated that an object moving on earth is deflected to the right (in the northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere: left) as a result of the earth's rotation. (Almost at the same time, the Dutch meteorologist Christoph Buys Ballot had found his formulation of the same fact: Buys-Ballot law ( Baric wind law )).

During his work in Cambridge, Ferrel had contact with mathematicians such as Simon Newcomb and Asaph Hall and published a number of important articles on hydrodynamics .

In the following years he also published: Popular Essays on the Movements of the Atmosphere (1882), Temperature of the Atmosphere and the Earth's Surface (1884), Recent Advances in Meteorology (1886), and A Popular Treatise on the Winds (1889 ).

In 1880 he proposed a mechanism with which the tides could be calculated in advance. This device went into operation three years later; with his help, the tides for the Coast and Geodetic Survey Tide Tables 1885 were determined. It served for 25 years.

See also

Horse widths , west wind zone , Coriolis force

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ferrel, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American meteorologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1817
PLACE OF BIRTH Bedford County (now Fulton County ), Pennsylvania , United States
DATE OF DEATH September 18, 1891
Place of death Martinsburg , West Virginia , United States