Robert FitzRoy

FitzRoy was a Royal Navy officer who commanded HMS Beagle on the voyage that carried Charles Darwin, and who later became head of the new Meteorological Department at the Board of Trade, founded in 1854. He set up a network of coastal stations reporting by telegraph, issued the first storm warnings to ports, and in 1861 began publishing daily weather forecasts in The Times, a word he helped bring into general use. His methods were criticized by contemporaries as unreliable, but the office he built became the Met Office, and his warning system is the direct ancestor of routine public forecasting.