The Gulf Stream is charted to explain slow mail

Assembled from 18 blocks · 1 evidence · 33 related

1. Story
2. Asked in 1768 why British mail packets sailing from Falmouth were consistently slower to America than ordinary merchantmen, Benjamin Franklin — then deputy postmaster general for the colonies — put the question to his cousin Timothy Folger, a Nantucket whaling captain, who attributed it to the Gulf Stream. Franklin had Folger sketch the current on a chart of the Atlantic with sailing remarks and sent it to the Post Office in October 1768; the engraved chart was available by early 1769, printed in very small numbers for packet captains. Later versions were printed in Paris around 1780–1783 and in Philadelphia in 1786.
3. Knowledge
4. Gulf Stream
5. The Gulf Stream is charted to explain slow mail
6. Connections
7. Gulf Stream
8. Western Intensification of Wind-Driven Gyres
9. North Atlantic — Grand Banks approaches
10. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)
11. North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre
12. RAPID-MOCHA-WBTS Array at 26.5°N
13. The Gulf Stream is charted to explain slow mail
14. Maury issues the Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic
15. The Physical Geography of the Sea is published
16. The Gulf Stream is found not to explain Europe's mild winters
17. Evidence
18. The Franklin–Folger Gulf Stream chart exists as a held cartographic item; the 1768 correspondence with Anthony Todd, the 1769 Mount & Page printing, and the later Paris and Philadelphia versions are described in Library of Congress and dealer catalogue accounts read via search summary. Neither the catalogue record nor Richardson's 1980 study of the charts was fetched.