Whiteout Warnings: Engineering the Telegraphic Sky

On a deceptively mild January morning in 1888, children across the American Midwest walked to school without their coats. Hours later, temperatures plummeted by forty degrees in a matter of minutes, trapping thousands in blinding, deadly whiteout conditions. The tragedy exposed a fatal flaw in the expanding nation: the United States had no unified system to warn its citizens of rapid meteorologi...