A reader writes:
You quoted Sam Anderson as saying, “The tradition goes back at least to Benjamin Franklin, who chased twisters on horseback, watching them chew paths through virgin Colonial forest.” While I found the article very interesting overall, this seems a bit fanciful. While Franklin was known for his interest in thunderstorms, it seems doubtful that he ever saw more than one or two tornadoes. Franklin’s home of Philadelphia is far from tornado alley, and while tornadoes do occur along the Eastern seaboard, they do so far less often than the Great Plains (there are some goods maps and data here).
In addition, storms that might be visible from miles away on the plains wouldn’t be in the virgin colonial forest. The Philadelphia area sees between one and three tornadoes per year per 10,000 square miles (larger than neighboring New Jersey; overall Pennsylvania sees 2.22 tornadoes per 10k sq mi per year) and I doubt Mr. Franklin had the means to easily traverse a 100-mile-square area to find these two tornadic storms each year. Even if he could easily ride 10 miles in search of storms, he’d have to wait 50 years before a tornado crossed his neck of the woods.
I’ve lived on the East Coast most of my life and never seen a tornado here (or, for that matter, even in Minnesota, where I lived for several years). While Ben Franklin’s interest in electrical storms is well-documented, I doubt he every paid mind to tornadoes.
Update from a reader:
Look, I don’t know whether Ben Franklin chased tornados or not, but your reader is flat-out wrong about tornados in Philadelphia. I lived in downtown Philly for 12 years and we had several damaging tornados while I was there. I was in the 1989 tornado that cut a path 50 yards wide through Society Hill and killed a girl from my neighborhood. Here’s a video of the aftermath of the 2011 tornado. Heck, a tornado touched down in South Jersey an hour from Philadelphia this morning.
Another:
Your reader’s response is a novel way of answering the question of whether Franklin saw a tornado. Another way is to go look at what Franklin wrote himself!
A cursory search of the great website franklinpapers.org, which makes his extant writings and incoming correspondence freely available to academics and the public alike, shows that Franklin did write about “whirlwinds.” I didn’t spot any evidence that he saw one in person. The pressing question for him seemed to be explaining waterspouts at sea. These were reported by sailors plying the busy ocean shipping lanes of the eighteenth century. Arm-chair natural philosophers such as Franklin later sought to explain such reports after the fact (and gain some prestige back in Europe while they were at it). A contemporaneous paper presented by one John Perkins to the American Philosophical Society in 1786 seems to have argued that these funnels were formed out of rainwater. I haven’t had the chance to read the paper myself, but an academic review describes it as “essentially extrapolated speculation and almost wholly erroneous.”
Franklin looks to have been closer to the mark by arguing that waterspouts were caused by low atmospheric pressure at their center, pulling up water at sea or debris on land as the vortex descended. I’m sure that other readers can better assess the scientific details of Franklin’s theory compared to our current understanding of tornadoes. At the least, while it would be false to picture Franklin as an eighteenth-century storm chaser on horseback, he did a better job of analyzing the data that other people collected than some of his contemporaries.
The reader follows up:
As a quick addendum to my previous email, it seems that I misunderstood that Perkins piece from 1786. Perkins makes some correct arguments about rainwater in spouts, despite many other errors in his piece compared to current science. Rather than having me stray so far from my own knowledge, perhaps you or your readers would be interested in reading Perkins’ paper here. There must be a waterspout expert somewhere in the world who reads your blog! And I hope that the point stands that Franklin wasn’t chasing cyclones around on horseback.
(Video: An interview with the author of Storm Kings: The Untold History of America’s First Tornado Chasers)
The Dish 