Archive Gallery: A Century of Weather Control

It's 1930 and, for obvious reasons, pilots want regular reports on the weather. What to do? Congress's solution was to give the U.S. Weather Bureau cash to send them what they needed. It was a lot of cash, too: $1.4 million, or "more than one third the sum it spend annually for all of its work."

About 13,000 miles of airway were monitored for activity, and reports were regularly sent via the now quaintly named "teletype"--an early fax machine, basically, that let a typed message be reproduced. Pilots were then radioed with the information.

From the article "Weather Man Makes the Air Safe."