1. William Ferrel was an American meteorologist who developed theories that explained the mid-latitude atmospheric circulation cell in detail, and it is after him that the Ferrel cell is named.
19 Facts About William Ferrel
1. 2.
William Ferrel was the eldest of eight children born to his father, Benjamin Ferrel, and his mother, whose first name is unknown.
3.
William Ferrel's mother was a farmer's daughter, and his family owned a farm in the Allegheny Mountains on which he was raised.
4.
William Ferrel saved his salary as a school teacher to attend Marshall College, but could only fund two years of his education.
5.
William Ferrel was able to graduate from Bethany College's first graduating class in 1844.
6.
William Ferrel would continue teaching in Missouri and Tennessee until 1858.
7.
William Ferrel studied Laplace's Mecanique Celeste, and these combined led him to believe that the motion of the Sun and moon on the tides was slowing the Earth's rotation around its axis.
8.
In 1854, William Ferrel set up a school in his new home, Nashville, Tennessee.
9.
In 1882, William Ferrel joined the United States Army Signal Service and retired in 1886.
10.
William Ferrel died in Maywood, a suburb of Kansas City, in 1891.
11.
William Ferrel demonstrated that it is the tendency of rising warm air, as it rotates due to the Coriolis effect, to pull in air from more equatorial, warmer regions and transport it poleward.
12.
William Ferrel improved upon Hadley's theory by recognizing an until then overlooked mechanism.
13.
William Ferrel recognized that in meteorology and oceanography what needs to be taken into account is a tendency, of an air mass that is in motion relative to Earth, to conserve its angular momentum with respect to Earth's Axis.
14.
William Ferrel studied the effects that the Sun and Moon had on the tides, and how it affected Earth's rotation about its axis.
15.
William Ferrel suggested that the tides could be explained by the Earth having a viscous interior, and attempted to study the magnetism of the Earth.
16.
William Ferrel collected data on the tides, and used this to calculate the mass of the moon.
17.
William Ferrel presented this idea to the American Association for the Advancement of Science later in the same year.
18.
William Ferrel resigned from the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1882, but stayed on to oversee the completion of this project, which was a big success and was used for over 25 years.
19.
William Ferrel wrote "Vision," an essay discussing his theories on how human sight works; his discussion was based in both mathematics and psychology, and backed up by experiments.