Weather Wide Web

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Like many technological advances, modern computer networking was brought into being by the U.S. military. In the mid-1950s, the Department of Defense commissioned the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and set the wheels in motion for the development of the first computer network, ARPA-NET. As the technology grew, networks began to form at other government agencies and research organizations.

But it could be argued that the seed of technology-based networking was planted long before that—in the 1870s in fact—when the U.S. Army Signal Service recorded the first systematized synchronous weather observations at 22 stations and telegraphed them to Washington, D.C. It was the dawn of the National Weather Service. Signal corps founder Colonel Albert J. Meyer wrote at the time “the idea of a world-wide system of telegraphic weather reports is not nearly as chimerical to-day as was thirty years ago the workings of the telegraph itself.” Shortly thereafter, synchronized weather reports were being telegraphed from Australia, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

http://www.weatherwise.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/2011/September-October%202011/weather-wide-web-full.html