How the modern weather map was born

Francis Galton's synoptic chart described conditions of the previous day and sidestepped the pitfalls of prediction

The first newspaper weather map was published in the Times on 1 April 1875, the work of polymath Francis Galton, an explorer and anthropologist who was also a statistician and meteorologist.

The map was not a forecast, but a representation of the conditions of the previous day. This is known as a synoptic chart, meaning that it shows a summary of the weather situation. Readers could make their own predictions based on the information it provided.