Matthew Fontaine Maury

Assembled from 16 blocks · 2 evidence · 4 related

1. Story
2. American naval officer (14 January 1806 – 1 February 1873) who ran the US Navy's Depot of Charts and Instruments and the Naval Observatory from 1844 to 1861, and who turned ships' logbooks into the first systematic maps of winds and currents. He issued the Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic in 1847, organised the international maritime conference at Brussels in August 1853 that standardised how merchant and naval ships recorded weather and ocean observations, and published The Physical Geography of the Sea in 1855 — commonly described as the first textbook of modern oceanography. He is also the origin of a durable error: the claim that the Gulf Stream is what makes northwest Europe mild is traced to him, and was still being repeated a century and a half later.
3. Knowledge
4. Matthew Fontaine Maury
5. The Brussels maritime conference standardises ocean observation
6. Connections
7. The Brussels maritime conference standardises ocean observation
8. Maury issues the Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic
9. The Brussels maritime conference standardises ocean observation
10. The Physical Geography of the Sea is published
11. The Gulf Stream is found not to explain Europe's mild winters
12. Matthew Fontaine Maury
13. Matthew Fontaine Maury
14. Evidence
15. The first comprehensive treatment of ocean winds and currents as a system, compiled from standardised ships' logbooks; commonly described as the first textbook of modern oceanography. The digitised volume was identified but not read; biographical facts about Maury come from Naval History and Heritage Command and encyclopaedia entries read via search summary.
16. The winter temperature contrast between western Europe and eastern North America is principally caused by atmospheric advection and the seasonal release of stored ocean heat, not by heat convergence from the Gulf Stream; the older claim is traced to Maury. Read via search summaries of the paper and of later commentary; not fetched.