By 1915, Champaign teenagers did not have to risk their necks to establish radio connections, because the Champaign High School had established a radio club, “with first class equipment.”52 An amateur wireless club in Urbana soon followed, divided into a group that could take or send eight words a minute and a probationary class.53
World War I put the brakes on amateur radio. After the United States entered into the war, the “radio inspector in Chicago” issued an order closing all interior wireless stations for its duration. The shutdown did more than clear the channels for official communication, it also reduced the danger of espionage, a significant concern in the Midwest due to its ethnic German residents. After alerting readers to the closing, the Courier ran another article warning resisters that the “chief government spy hunter in the middle west” would send federal agents to demolish the plants with axes. As a further goad to compliance, the Courier reported that Boy Scouts were ferreting out illegal radios.54
After the war, radio fans collected their confiscated instruments and reassembled their sets. The Urbana High School inaugurated an evening wireless telegraphy class in 1919, open to operators from the sixth grade onward. The Champaign County Radio Association also geared up in 1919, with a whites-only membership rule.55 Catering to the growing market for wireless supplies, the Swartz Electric Shop advertised that it could equip entire outfits.56 The Co-op Store competed for market share by building a model station and hiring a “wireless man” to offer suggestions.57
Although the number of radio operators was not particularly large (in 1917, the War Department had solicited twenty-four wireless operators from the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana to join the naval reserve), the public footprint was larger.58 Electrical engineering shows at the university offered the public a chance to see radio equipment.59 The state weather bureau in Springfield turned to amateur wireless operators to help it disseminate forecasts.60 Wireless exhibits could be found at the county fair.61 The Courier further spread wireless awareness through various articles on wireless telegraphy.62 This coverage included tips for do-it-yourselfers, such as using barbed wire to wind the tuners for long-distance communication.63
To operate a wireless meant to participate in a world of astounding connectivity, a world in which messages flashed from San Francisco to Japan in 1911; from Australia to Germany by 1917.64 Though such records remained out of reach for the amateurs of Champaign, the wireless opened up expansive channels. The operators of the Western Union wire picked up messages from Galveston, Guantánamo, Havana, Norfolk, New York City, and Boston; from the Atlantic coast and occasionally from a transatlantic liner.65 When the Astronomy Department of the University of Illinois set up its wireless apparatus, the listeners told of messages from Atlantic liners, Great Lakes steamships, and Key West.66 The “boys” of the Champaign High School radio club intercepted messages from along the Atlantic seaboard, Newfoundland to Florida.67
These operators could communicate directly with people beyond the thousand-mile mark, indeed, beyond the boundaries of the nation. For these early amateur radio operators, the point was not so much the contents of steamship chatter as the ability to access it. The point was connectivity itself. What else could explain the excitement over Winfield Davis’s kite? Entered in a school contest, it received signals through a wire attached to the string.68 Nobody seemed to care what the signals said, but the spectators cared a lot about getting them.
With the advent of the wireless, the air itself took on new meanings, as a place of boundless possibilities. The president of the Champaign County Old Settlers’ Association conveyed this sense of the air when he spoke, in 1908, on the telegraph, telephone, and wireless telegraphy. Together, they had changed the world, making it a better place in which to live.69 Thinking back on the pioneer settlement they had once known and forward to the new world on the horizon, the old-timers in his audience could take pride in having been part of a process that was moving Champaign from the edge of civilization to the thick of it, or, conversely, from the thickets to the cutting edge. If they could have seen over the horizon, a century beyond their own time, they would have glimpsed satellite-guided tractors, locating themselves to within a fraction of an inch, even as their drivers listened to the radio and fiddled with their cell phones.
CLIMATE CHANGES
In deciding whether to move to a strange new land, settler colonists thought a lot about geography, including questions of climate and weather. In the absence of other geographic texts, many of them turned to emigration guides. James P. Caird’s Prairie Farming in America typifies the boosterish geographies of this genre. Tackling the question of climate, Caird admitted that Illinois might not be as “equable” as Britain. Like neighboring prairie states, it suffered from severe winters and hot summers. Such variation in temperature made it hard to locate Illinois in relation to England, with its more limited temperature range. Caird positioned Illinois as climatically southern, at least in comparison to the rival destination of Canada, when he alluded to the seasonal prevalence of ague and, more positively, to the relative absence of “many of the fatal complaints which are met with in colder latitudes.” But in Caird’s geography, Illinois was not strictly southern, for it lay in the temperate zone. And Illinois was moving north. As cultivation increased, the incidents of warm-weather fevers were declining, thereby leaving Illinois more equable (and English) than it had been prior to European settlement.70
Whereas emigration guides focused on the specificities of place—on categories and comparisons—settler geographies ventured into the matter of connective currents. Caird’s contemporary Matthias Lane Dunlap knew what to expect climate-wise in Illinois, having established a successful orchard in Champaign. The questions that concerned him, when it came to prairie geography, were not so much “what” as “why.”71 Dunlap’s efforts to advance farming led him to the weather, and his efforts to understand weather led him in search of its origins. That, in turn, led him to Africa.
In an essay from the 1850s, Dunlap drew on understandings of trade winds to explain the currents that coursed over his orchard. “When we cast our eyes over the maps of the western world and examine its air currents, we find the trade winds setting in from the coast of Africa, and passing west until they meet an impassable barrier, in the Andes or Cordillery range of mountains.” These mountains channeled the “immense stream” of African air northward, to the Gulf of Mexico. From there, the African wind flowed east, “around the capes of Florida,” and north, “up the delta of the Mississippi, whence it branches off like a fan up the various valleys and tributaries of this great water course.”72
Having retained its African character in its long journey to the Gulf of Mexico, the hot wind began to dissipate in the Illinois area, as it mingled with cooler currents. For half the year, its lingering traces produced “a continual season of almost intertropical climate.” But in the winter, the current from Africa withdrew. Without the “African simoon” to “check the accumulations of arctic cold,” the freezing currents from the north swept down with unrestrained severity.73 Uncontested, these northern winds claimed the region completely for themselves. Illinois might seem more tropical than temperate in the summer months, when hot and cold mingled together. But in the winter, it became fully arctic. Though the meeting place between African simoons and polar blasts, Dunlap’s farm skewed north meteorologically, lying a little closer to the white snows of Canada than to the black field hands in the adjacent slave states.
This mapping of Atlantic wind patterns, published in the American Meteorological Journal in 1893, echoes earlier mappings that attributed the hot, humid summers of the Midwest to seasonal winds from Africa.
William Morris Davis, “The General Winds of the Atlantic Ocean,” The American Meteorological Journal 9 (March 1893), 476–88, unnumbered insert page.
LONG-RANGE FORECASTING
However useful in attracting more settlers and in conceptualizin
g their new home, writings on general weather patterns had little day-to-day utility. Climate may have been of ongoing theoretical interest, but for residents, a more pressing and perpetual meteorological matter was the forecast. For farmers, accurate weather predictions could mean the difference between profit or loss, abundance or dearth, and, on occasions such as freak freezes and sudden storms, the difference between life and death.
Before the advent of professional meteorology, people in particular places tried to figure out the weather by observing their surroundings. They came up with all kinds of guidelines, some noted by the Courier: if pigs pasturing in a field built a nest—expect a storm. “Rainbow at noon, rain very soon.”74 The ways that smoke rose and the ways that clouds streaked foretold some change in the weather “to the man whose eye has been trained to recognize the signs.” The “peculiar actions of birds” especially merited watching.75 When swallows flew low, wet weather could be expected, because that signaled a descent of insects from moist upper regions.76 Long-distance fliers could also help with forecasts, since “they never venture far from home when bad weather is brewing.”77 All these methods of weather prediction relied on on-the-ground observations. All were relevant only to the surrounding area. And all were utterly inadequate to predicting how the weather would change. Did a red sunset augur clear weather or rain?78 Each position had its steadfast proponents.
This uncertainty explains some of the appeal of the “weather prophets” who looked for distant signs and larger patterns. These weather predictors continued in the vein of astrological reports long found in farmers’ almanacs. They based their reports on analyses of the moon and “star divinations” as well as on observations of animals and plants.79 Citing the “astronomic outlook” and planetary energy, one popular prophet mentioned in the Courier offered forecasts one month out. Even more impressively, his methods enabled him to predict the weather for “the whole world over,” barring “a compensating resultant of warring forces that we cannot now see.”80 Though not necessarily wrong in their predictions that the weather would change somehow somewhere, such weather prophets were not very helpfully right.81
Barometers provided a more reliable method for predictions, for rapid rises and falls indicated unsettled weather and storms. Yet the Courier’s instructions on how to use them suggest that they were not a common tool.82 Furthermore, barometers were useful only for short-range forecasts. Like pigs and smoke and birds, they warned only of imminent changes. Farmers’ ongoing search for accurate long-range forecasts made them a core constituency for meteorological science—so much so that the federal government moved meteorology from the U.S. Army Signal Service to the Department of Agriculture in 1890.
Professional meteorologists tackled the problem of weather prediction by figuring out the fundamental laws of physics that governed the weather, gathering observations, and networking so as to discover patterns as they unfolded in time and space.83 The Courier’s coverage of these efforts underscored the value of imperial outposts, common procedures, and communications networks for long-term weather forecasting.84 Readers could see the results for themselves, in the changing nature of weather coverage. Whereas weather reportage had once been pointillist and past tense—a matter of site-specific news reports on recent weather events—it broadened in the early years of the twentieth century to encompass the moving lines of fronts and waves with bearing on the future.85 This way of seeing the weather was so novel that at least one Illinois horticulture society offered lessons in reading meteorological maps.86
As meteorological science advanced in the late nineteenth century, advice on predicting the weather shifted from guidance on watching birds to the need to heed the Signal Service. In 1906, the U.S. Weather Bureau issued forecasts thirty-six to forty-eight hours ahead.87 By 1913, the bureau was able to issue forecasts a week in advance, by monitoring where the weather would come from.88 Longer-range forecasting promoted geographical awareness, and not just in the pages of meteorological journals. Daily newspapers played a major role in relaying meteorologists’ geographic analyses to large audiences.
Much of the Courier’s weather reporting positioned Champaign as a place where winds from the more western states passed through en route to the east.89 This was, in part, an artifact of Weather Bureau politics. Although the Weather Bureau’s mappings aimed at crop prediction lumped Illinois and neighboring states in with grain-growing areas in Canada, as a national agency, reporting to a national constituency, it squeezed most of its weather coverage into national maps, with not much more cross-border spillage than one would find in a preschooler’s coloring book.90 On the occasions when the lines extended far into the Pacific, they drew attention to the nation’s expanding geographical reach. The Courier attributed better forecasts to the Weather Bureau’s ability to track storms from the Philippines, Japan, Siberia, and Alaska that traveled to the Midwest on established paths, following particular timetables. “For example,” ran one of its articles, “a storm coming from Siberia drifts eastward around the North Pole and reappears in Alaska. It should appear in Washington and Oregon in about two days, should get to the Great Lakes in six days and to the Atlantic coast in seven or eight days.” However distant the U.S. colony in the Philippines might seem, airstreams placed it only a week away.91
THE POLITICS OF TORNADO MAPS
The sense of being poised between north-south weather wars and west-to-east winds climaxed in the coverage of what were coming to be the defining weather events of the Midwest: tornadoes. At first glance, much of the Courier’s tornado news had a local feel. Eyewitnesses reported watching the distinctive funnel clouds emerge in the air before them.92 Spectators described tornadoes as cutting a short and narrow trail of devastation before dissolving into the surrounding thunderstorms. Accounts of the damage on the ground revealed horrifyingly concentrated damage.
In May of 1917, a tornado killed sixty-two people and maimed six hundred more after hitting the town of Mattoon, about thirty miles south of the Champaign county line. The papers reported a pig disemboweled by the wind; a telephone pole driven though a house. Within seconds, the compacted power of the funnel cloud had turned 120 blocks of cottages into a barren mass of debris.93 Although it hurtled lumber, bits of furniture, and baby apparel into the surrounding countryside, those who watched it from the relative safety of Champaign, those who read about it in the Champaign papers, and the estimated two thousand sightseers from Champaign who flocked to the scene of desolation saw the tornado as specific to Mattoon.94
But in the ensuing days, as wires were restrung, news came in that the Mattoon tornado was one of several that had emerged from a storm that swept from Kansas to Indiana, going as far south as Alabama and as far north as Chicago.95 This storm system, in turn, fit into a larger regional pattern. Although the Courier ran tornado reports from a broad smattering of places—from Mauritius to Russia, Arizona, Manitoba, and New Jersey—most of the tornado news that appeared in its pages covered an area stretching from Oklahoma to Ohio.96 The Courier echoed the latest meteorological findings in characterizing tornadoes as a feature of the “middle west.”97 Positioned in the center of the nation, the tornado belt resembled a conveyor belt that connected the far West to the East.
Yet the tornado belt could be seen another way: as the kind of belt that separated top from bottom. More than just the place where the West turned into the East, the Midwest could be seen the way that Caird and Dunlap saw it: as the line between the North and the South. Plenty of weather coverage in the Courier brought such mappings to mind. Especially in the colder months, weather reports drew attention to aerial connections to the North. They traced the “excessive cold” of winter to the “British Northwest Territory,” “the British Possessions north of Montana,” and to a “great Polar atmospheric wave.”98 Warmer weather drew attention to the South, to phenomena like the Bermuda High, which prevented heated currents from leaving the continent for the ocean.99 To explain the changes in th
e seasons, the Courier wrote of wind currents emanating from the Antarctic and the Arctic.100 Reports on the cold fronts and blizzards that swept down from Canada and the heat waves and hurricanes that tore up the Ohio valley from the Gulf positioned Champaign at the point of encounter between the North and the South.101
The result was, in many cases, violent clashes. In contrast to Britain, which was comparatively temperate year-round, the skies above Illinois seemed at times to be in the midst of a “titanic war,” with “heat invasions” jostling with Goth- and Vandal-like blizzards for dominance.102 This vein of weather reportage reanimated the issue that had caught Dunlap’s attention a generation earlier: Which side was Illinois on? Did Champaign skew more to the North or the South?
Through the early years of the twentieth century, tornadoes appeared to position the Midwest more toward the South, because of the company they kept. Until the teens, weather reporters did not always distinguish between hurricanes, cyclones, and tornadoes.103 They sometimes used more than one of these terms to refer to a single weather event.104 The weather coverage in the Courier fit into this larger pattern. It labeled a violent windstorm that reportedly plucked seven geese clean a tornado in the headline and a cyclone in the body of the article.105 It affixed the word cyclone both to the tropical storms that devastated cities like Havana and the whirlwinds that wreaked damage closer by.106 It labeled a windstorm that dismantled houses in Champaign a hurricane and then, further muddling things, “either the forerunner or the tail end of a tornado.”107
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