Until 1950, U.S. Weathermen Were Forbidden From Talking About Tornadoes

But there was one place you couldn’t find them: the weather report. From 1887 up until 1950, American weather forecasters were forbidden from attempting to predict tornadoes. Mentioning them was, in the words of one historian, “career suicide.”

During that time, Roger Edwards of the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center writes, “tornadoes were, for most, dark and mysterious menaces of unfathomable power, fast-striking monsters from the sky capable of sudden and unpredictable acts of death and devastation.”

Less than confident in their own predictive powers and fearful of the responses of a panicky public, “the use of the word ‘tornado’ in forecasts was at times strongly discouraged and at other times forbidden” by the Weather Bureau, Edwards writes, replaced by euphemisms like “severe local storms.”

Of course, a ban on the word tornado wouldn’t have been necessary without someone who really, really wanted to talk about tornadoes. That role was first played by John Park Finley, an officer with the Army Signal Office with a deep interest in severe storms. The U.S. Army Signal Service first opened a weather forecasting office in 1870, and when Finley enlisted in 1877, he joined it immediately, relates Nancy Mathis in Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado.