“I have started that which the country will not willingly let die.” —Cleveland Abbe (in an 1869 letter to his father)
“What best to do with a million dollars. An appeal for a school of meteorological research.” —Cleveland Abbe (writing in the New York Herald, Jan. 24, 1904)
When it comes to seeking financial support from private sources, scientists—including the meteorological community—have form. Here are a few bits of that history.
For meteorologists, it begins with Cleveland Abbe. AMS members should find the name Cleveland Abbe1 familiar. We know it best from the eponymous AMS Cleveland Abbe Award for Distinguished Service to the Atmospheric and Related Sciences by an Individual.2 Extensive historic detail on the man is available in a fine book by Sean Potter: Too Near for Dreams: The Story of Cleveland Abbe, America’s First Weather Forecaster, published by AMS in 2020.
In that 1869 letter to his father, the 31-year-old Abbe was referring to a private-weather-sector enterprise set up under the aegis of the Cincinnati (astronomical) Observatory, where Abbe was then the director. He had struck a deal with telegraph operators to the south and west of Cincinnati. Using daily data from their respective stations, he would derive patterns in the prevailing weather conditions upwind from Cincinnati and note their movement, using them to make forecasts for the area. Two years later, Abbe would be continuing that work—by then employed by the U.S. Army Signal Service as their chief meteorologist. For years the Signal Service would rely upon in-kind support from Western Union to telegraph the needed data. (Ever wonder where that clunky language and those abbreviations in weather forecast teletypes came from? They originated from efforts to reduce Western Union charges, which were per-word.)
The young Abbe had it right; whether from government sources, or the private sector, the public’s appetite for weather information would only grow, especially as forecast skill improved and weather forecasts became more actionable. Fast forward to 1904. Now 66, Abbe had learned that while the public was addicted to weather services, its support for meteorological education and research was tepid. By this time, the government functions had been transferred from the Signal Service to the Department of Agriculture. Abbe had maintained his government position, but he had also picked up a collaboration with Johns Hopkins; hence his plea for financial assistance for such work.3 Recall that at that time, powerful industrialists and financiers, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and others, had earned the sobriquet “robber barons” as they amassed enormous fortunes through monopolistic, ruthless, predatory business practices. These and others less wealthy had means and motivation to fund various charitable works to work their way into the public’s good graces; they were Abbe’s target audience. “Robber barons” remained a thing even into the Great Depression of the 1930s, popularized by Matthew Josephson’s 1934 book, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists 1861-1901.
Speaking of the Great Depression, we tend to see it as a time of widespread poverty—and it was. But there were a few super-wealthy. One such was Alfred Loomis, an attorney and investment banker. A year before the stock market crash of 1929, Loomis had pulled out all his holdings and purchased gold. After the crash, he was able to purchase assets for a song. He amassed a fortune, estimated to be the equivalent of $700M today.
As it happens, Loomis was interested in science and technology.
“Interested in” understates it. During the Depression, he anonymously paid the Physical Review journal’s fees for authors who could not afford them. Loomis was living in Tuxedo Park at the time, an exclusive residential community in Orange County, New York. He built a personal laboratory there with state-of-the-art equipment. According to Wikipedia, some in the science community initially saw him as “an eccentric dabbler,” but soon his laboratory became the meeting place for some of the most accomplished scientists of the era, such as Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others. Loomis participated in preliminary meetings standing up the Manhattan Project. He was also funding and leading research in the development of microwave radar. Vannevar Bush (who would later be a key figure in establishing the National Science Foundation) put Loomis in charge of coordinating radar work with British researchers at the start of World War II. His role in these developments contributed to the ultimate Allied victory. The scientists who worked with Loomis personally came to trust his abilities and commitment. He would later be elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
There’s so much more! It’s summarized in another delightful book, this published in 2013: Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II, by Jennet Conant (the granddaughter of James B. Conant, the chemist who became president of Harvard and served as first ambassador to West Germany at the conclusion of the war).
You can see where all this is going. As one present-day example, consider the wobbly federal funding for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR owes its start to private funding. Its origins trace back to the High Altitude Observatory, and to seed funding in 1940 from Harvard College Observatory (itself privately endowed). After America’s entry into World War II, the critical connection between solar activity and telecommunications secured government support. Today NCAR’s annual budget is some $250M/year, about 50% from NSF, the rest largely from other federal agencies (and in a 2023-28 budget agreement, the NSF funding is supposed to increase substantially). At a 4%/year draw, this means NSF could be funded in perpetuity by a one-time donation of, say, $6 billion dollars. For comparison, a dozen of the richest U.S. billionaires could individually make such a $6B donation with 10% or less of their net worth.
This crude reckoning greatly overstates the opportunity, for several reasons. First, there are many competing claims for the resources of philanthropists, and a great number of those involve direct payments to the poorest individuals in our society in greatest need. Philanthropists want to see their resources put to the most effective use (at its extreme and somewhat controversial form, under the label of effective altruism). It takes a certain mindset to see the potential for the work of an organization like NCAR to better the lives of millions or tens of millions, thereby leveling the apparent return-on-investment. Second, philanthropists might naturally believe that basic research should be supported by the population as a whole and might be a more appropriate draw on government resources. Private donors would rather not give governments a free pass to redirect research money to lesser priorities. One such past example also involves NCAR. In the 1980s, John McCarthy and the team that would one day become NCAR’s Research Applications Laboratory had developed science and technology that could reduce the vulnerability of commercial jet aircraft to thunderstorm downbursts and low-altitude windshear on takeoff and landing. The team turned to the commercial aviation sector, looking to the airlines for help in lobbying the Reagan administration (running things then) and the Congress to implement the technology at airports nationwide. But the airlines demurred, fearing that the Reagan administration would tell them that since it was in their special interest, they should fund it. Only later, understanding that the technology served the needs of the larger flying public, would the government fund the new measures.
A third reason for donor hesitancy: concern that such generous support might invite permanent dependency instead of serving as a kind of “bridge loan” giving NCAR time to “stand on its own two feet.” To appreciate the difference, a full three-year $750M bridge loan would be well within the means of the more-than 100 Americans worth more (in some cases, a lot more) than $10B. And the $750M figure overstates the actual amount likely to be needed, given that NSF will likely continue support at some level.
But there’s a more ominous overlay to the current NCAR problem and the broader challenges facing scientific research generally—one that Loomis and his peers didn’t have to face back in the day: the current high-level animus towards certain scientific disciplines. Over the last year or so, those with deep pockets, whether corporate or individual, are all too aware that visible support for environmental research might invite political ire and swift punishment–threatening not just their generosity, but their entire fortunes.
Of course, politics being politics, that can sometimes change over a single night…
- Those wanting to learn a bit more about the man and his impact can also consult Cleveland Abbe and American Meteorology, 1871-1901, by Edmund P. Willis and William H. Hooke, (Volume 87, Issue 3 of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society). ↩︎
- The 2027 winner? Eric DeWeaver, for “two decades of distinguished leadership of NSF’s Climate and Large-Scale Dynamics Program, sustaining community modeling, observing systems, and generations of scientists.” ↩︎
- Full disclosure: I’ve never been able to access the full text of this article; W. J. Humphreys cites it in his 1918 obituary on Abbe, written for the National Academy of Sciences. ↩︎
