From the archives

Arrival of Radiosonde Balloon Inflation Shelter atop Blue Hill--about 1937. The Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, Massachusetts, was the site of many firsts in the science of meteorology. The oldest continuously operating weather observatory in the United States was conceived and constructed by Abbott Lawrence Rotch of Boston in 1885. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1884, Rotch was named Harvard's first professor of meteorology in 1906 and by then had improved and expanded the Observatory in three phases. Not only was the Observatory a center for research and observation in the United States, but Rotch also built a library in which he collected climatological …