Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXVI THE WEATHER BUREAU AND THE PUBLIC A FEW years ago a member of the French Academy of Science called at the San Diego Weather Bureau office, and having been shown the meteorological apparatus and informed as to the application of the data to the everyday needs of commerce and agriculture, exclaimed, "You Americans are a wonderful people. You not only equal the French in the use of delicate instruments from which theories are evolved, but you excel us in making the results worth dollars and cents." And had this French scientist visited some of the Weather Bureau offices in the flood districts, or the cautionary signal stations on the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Atlantic coast, he could have added human life to the pecuniary saving. An article in the Century Magazine a few years ago stated that the Weather Bureau costs the United States a million and a half dollars a year, but that a conservative insurance company figured that on an average the people of the United States saved annually $30,000,000 because of then weather service, and this in addition to thousands of lives. THE CURVE OF COMFORT The perfect adjustment of climate and health might be called the curve of comfort. It finds full expression in San Diego, and for that reason it is not strange that some people think the work of theweather man is over when he hangs out his little card: "Fair tonight and Sunday." It is believed that San Diego offers innumerable opportunities to show the ability of the Weather Bureau employes in perceiving and utilizing the service to the good of the community. Some of the practical uses of the Weather Bureau to the everyday walks of life may be found in the following quotation from the act of Congress of 1890, which summarizes the general functions of the Wea...