biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1817–91)
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| biography:
| Meteorologist, born in Fulton Co, Pennsylvania, USA. Largely self-taught, he is credited with moving meteorology from a descriptive science to a quantitative science. He was the first to describe mathematically the significance of the earth's rotation on its surface bodies. Known as Ferrel's Law, it states ‘if a body is moving in any direction, there is a force, arising from the earth's rotation, which always deflects it to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere’. He was a school teacher in the midwest before joining the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac in Cambridge, MA (1857). During 1867–82 he worked on the US Coast and Geodetic Survey. As a member of the Signal Service (1882–6), he invented a tide machine, the first to predict maximum and minimum tides. His publications include Popular Essays on Movement of the Atmosphere (1882). |
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