Now You Can "See" Tornadoes on TV!
March 1969 Popular Mechanics

December 1974 Popular Mechanics

[Table of Contents] Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early mechanics and electronics. See articles from Popular Mechanics, published continuously since 1902. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.

Until I read this 1974 Popular Mechanics magazine article, I thought the term "diode" was unique to the study of electronics. Meteorologists have also adopter it to describe a phenomenon whereby a tornado funnel simulates "vacuum diode." Vacuum is created by air swirling at high speed and oxygen being burned in a funnel by "positive going" electricity rising to create a pulse generator. OK, so it is an electrical thing, but still interesting that the physical wind process facilitates the charges. In fact, that is what led Newton Weller to correlate the strange whiteout of his television screen with a nearby tornado. His discovery became a well-known phenomenon later used by people living in tornado-prone areas as a dire warning to take cover or evacuate. Turns out that vacuum diode generates signals that include near the lowest VHF TV channel frequency of 55.25 MHz (video content). The test involved tuning to channel 13 (211.25 MHz), far from the storm frequency, and adjusting the picture brightness for a dark screen with barely visible picture. Then, switch to channel 2. If the screen lights up, scram. That method was particularly useful to rural inhabitants with minimal communications. Today, people receive warnings on the radio, Internet, TV, and cellphone. Still tornadoes can pop up out of nowhere. We've lived in the Midwest, including Ohio and Minnesota, and never saw a tornado. A couple years ago here in Greensboro, NC, we were standing on the porch and watch a mini-tornado come across the tree tops and snap off a couple trunks and branches as it travelled across an open field. One of those trees was less than 100 feet from our house. Ya, just never know...

Now You Can "See" Tornadoes on TV!

By Henry and Vera Bradshaw

Illustrations by Herb Mott

Just tune to Channel 2. If it turns up white, head for the cellar!

Clouds were dark. Lightning was zigzagging wildly in the skies. But outside of the threat of a probable thunderstorm, it was a normal, quiet, September Sunday afternoon in the little Dutch tulip town of Orange City, Iowa. Businesses were closed; families, home from church, were having their traditional get-togethers. There was no hint that this tranquility would soon be broken and the town strewn with wrecked homes, uprooted trees and downed power lines.

Norman Boonstra, a chemist, and his wife, were watching a TV portrayal of Hamlet on Channel 14. But during commercials, Boonstra, noting the lightning and out of curiosity, would switch to Channel 2, darken the screen and observe the lightning flashes on it. He found this intriguing, He was doing this because he had read a story that morning in the Sunday Des Moines Register and Tribune about Newton Weller, who claimed anyone with a TV could tune in a tornado or severe storm.

Each time Boonstra turned from Hamlet to Channel 2, he noted the lightning was becoming more severe, and bands were wider and stayed longer on the screen. Then, suddenly, he and his wife were shocked to see the dark screen light up and turn white - the signal, according to Weller, that a tornado was near.

"The screen went white - completely white," says Boonstra. The Boonstras did not go to the basement. "Because," he explains, "I just didn't know how much stock to put in this white-screen thing and I was more interested in Hamlet. It must have been about 20 minutes later that I heard the siren - the long blast that is our tornado warning. The wife and I made a mad dash to the basement carrying the portable TV, but the power was off and I couldn't use it - I wanted to see if the screen was still white on Channel 2."

Boonstra's house began to get a peppering. Boonstra says he foolishly sprinted back upstairs. Through a window, he saw debris flying by and he watched, almost stunned, as a patio roof across the street lifted like an airplane and sailed away. Then he saw the tornado moving toward him - the tornado he had seen before and hadn't believed.

... no doubt about it: Boonstra had tuned in a tornado ...

Luckily, the vicious, whirling funnel skipped around Boonstra's house. But much of Orange City, a town of 3000, did not fare as well. Before the tornado completed its horrible bulldozing, it had done $100 million in damage, and left people homeless and bewildered.

There was no doubt about it: Boonstra had tuned in a tornado on his TV set and gotten a 20-minute warning that it was on its way. So had many others in Orange City and neighboring towns that day. But because they did not have the conventional weather warning, all disregarded the TV tornado warning. But never again! To a person they vow that whenever they see a white screen on Channel 2, they will alert the town and get their families to safety.

This system, which can be used anywhere, is considered one of the most dramatic breakthroughs in weather forecasting - it could well save your life.

Called the Weller Method after its discoverer, Newton Weller, of West Des Moines, it merely requires a slight adjustment in tuning Channel 2. Turn on your TV, dial Channel 13, darken the screen to the threshold of blackness, then switch to Channel 2. Now, if your screen is stark white, or turns white after being black like Channel 13, head for shelter-quick! A tornado is within 2.0 miles of you, or possibly closer. If lightning flashes (horizontal white streaks across your screen) become wide bands and linger, a dangerous storm is in the offing and you should get to safety immediately.

Dr. James M. Quigg, state climatologist for Missouri, regards the Weller Method as the possible "missing link" in the chain of tornado detection. One link is radar by which only 50 percent of tornadoes can be detected and these in such a broad territorial area that it cannot be accurately predicted if or where they will strike. Another is an oscilloscope, which can track a tornado but ordinarily, not pinpoint it. With Weller's Method, there is no guessing. A tornado funnel can be positively identified near the area about to be clobbered.

Weller discovered that the 55-megacycle band (Channel 2), is the nearest TV has to the electrical frequency of the pulse of a tornado. The pulse generator - Mother Nature's own device, for setting up an electrical flow - creates the voltage that triggers Channel 2. If you want it scientifically, the pulse generator is a spiraling force of lightning revolving around a vacuum core. It sits high in the thunderhead, about 18,000 feet and, if you could see it, would look much like a faraway satellite flashing tiny bluish-purple rays. There is no thunder because the funnel is a vacuum chamber. The funnel then, which descends from the pulse generator to the ground, becomes much like a vacuum diode tube. In a tornado, pulses flow from the ground to the pulse generator in the cloud above. This gargantuan vacuum tube, a phenomenon of nature, makes the system work.

Weller made his discovery three years ago, but kept it secret until he had tested it over and over again. (One of his few confidants was Paul Waite, Iowa climatologist for the U.S, Weather Bureau, who was sure Weller had made a great discovery and was at his elbow with assistance and encouragement.) When Weller was positive his method was foolproof, he contacted news media, and the story broke in the Des Moines Register and Tribune on Sunday, Sept. 22, 1968.

"Surely," Weller says, reflectively, "Someone up there was looking over my shoulder. The announcement couldn't have been more timely."

At 5:10 p.m., the very day the story broke, the tornado hit Orange City and gave the Weller Method the supreme test - that of people actually seeing a tornado on their TV screens.

Another family having this surprising experience was that of Willard Van Steenwyk, living in the opposite end of town from the Boonstras. A going-away party was in progress for young Mr. and Mrs. James Bolluyt, about to join the Peace Corps. Among the 16 adults present were Mr. and Mrs. George Vogel. A fire truck sped by with its beeper going - Orange City's tornado alert. But no one at the Van Steenwyks was alarmed.

"Hey - fellow in the morning paper claims you can see a tornado on TV," James Bolluyt remarked banteringly. "Let's try." The TV set was turned to Channel 2 and darkened, as everyone watched skeptically.

"But just like the fellow said," .van Steenwyk recalls, "we saw the horizontal streaks of lightning - ours in color, because we have color TV. All of a sudden that screen lit up - it was ghostly white. We couldn't believe it. Thought something was wrong with the TV and we turned the knob away down trying to get the brightness off, but it wouldn't go - it stayed white. We were still trying when power went off."

Van Steenwyk strode outside to look around. Only a few leaves rustled. "Some tornado," he laughed, discounting the power failure. But just then the telephone rang inside. It was for George Vogel. "Your new house just blew away," a distressed voice said, "in a tornado."

Providentially, the Van Steenwyks' house was not in its path but the twister plowed through homes only a few blocks away. Van Steenwyk was so amazed that he issued strict orders that no one was to touch the TV set. When the power came on four hours later, Channel 2 was black.

"I'm glad that 15 adults were there to see that white screen," Van Steenwyk says. "Otherwise, it was all so eerie, who would have believed me?"

Residents recall that, prior to the tornado, they heard no emergency weather announcements. The tornado alert came from two farm families, eight miles south of the town, who saw the funnels heading for Orange City and called the sheriff.

Hunt Davis, staff member of Good Will Industries at Sioux City, who lives in Cherokee, used the Weller Method to spot the Orange City tornado even farther away - 33 miles. But his TV was on the top floor of a two-story apartment house on a hill with an outside antenna 25 feet high.

"I read about Weller's method in the paper and decided to have some fun watching the lightning flashes," Davis told us. "It was fascinating - but then came that white screen indicating a tornado."

"Thirty miles or more is an unusual distance," Weller points out. "But most of these families had good TV receptional setups. Ordinarily, the maximum could be 20 miles, but the average is about five, and I'd like to stress that so people will seek shelter fast. Severe storms spawn tornadoes and this could happen right over your home."

The 55-year-old Weller, a self-educated electronics engineer whose laboratory is in his bedroom, did not "just happen" on his method. It was the result of years of study. He has been interested in storms most of his life - they fascinate him - but only after he was the victim of a heart attack some years ago did he devote full time to them. At first, he used an oscilloscope to track storms, but its single horizontal line caused him to ask, "Why not TV with 525 lines on its rasters?"

This transfer to TV eventually brought about the Weller Method. He had long worked with Channel 5 until his computations and experiments showed Channel 2 held the secret. (Many researchers had been tracking tornadoes with an oscilloscope at a low frequency from 150-500 kilocycles, which is a long way from the high frequency of 55 megacycles.)

Weller theorizes that a tornado is detected by pulses of energy. A few researchers doubt that all tornadoes carry pulse generators, but Weller maintains they do. And he adds that "pulse generators are not confined to tornadoes - some severe electrical storms also have them."

Technically, turning down the brightness on your TV changes the bias (differential of voltage) of the grid or cathode circuit (depending on circuiting) to the point where the tube will not permit electrons to flow. If a tornado is near, voltage from the pulse generators will be so strong, it will correct the picture-tube bias and the screen will become white.

Here are questions we asked Weller to answer for Popular Mechanics readers:

What if Channel 2 has a program on it? "It doesn't matter. If you are dark on Channel 13 and get a picture when you turn to Channel 2, it spells tornado. Start with a dark screen, even with a program in progress on Channel 2. A tornado lightens it so the picture is visible."

Do you need an outside antenna to detect a tornado?

"No. Many of the people in Orange City had only rabbit ears or single antenna. My original experiments were made with rabbit ears. An outside antenna will simply expand the range of detection."

When should you turn on your set to detect a tornado?

"When you see threatening clouds on the horizon, or if you feel a thunderstorm is exceptionally intense. (Tornadoes normally occur at the back end of a storm, or if a tornado alert has been issued for your area.)"

If I turn to Channel 2 and do not see a completely white screen, but intermittent wide white bands across it, should I take this seriously?

"By all means. Your set is forecasting an intense storm which could not only do severe damage but could spawn a tornado. The wider the bands, the more severe the storm is becoming. Sometimes lightning will streak the screen only instanteously, which signals a thunderstorm. But if the flashes fade slowly, it is a dangerous storm, whether or not a tornado is in it."

Why do you turn to Channel 13 and darken it first?

"Only because Channel 13 is a 211-megacycle frequency, so far from 55-megacycle Channel 2 there is no interference. Darkening 13 first, then switching to 2 precludes someone turning first to 2, finding it white (a tornado) and unwittingly darkening out the tornado, which is possible on some TV sets."

Many Midwestern tornado experts are excited about the discovery. Dr. Quigg believes the Weller Method should be explored further and that it may be especially effective for "night detection of tornadoes." Dr. L. A. Joos of Kansas City, regional climatologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau, advocates further exploration. Joos and his associate, Paul Waite, have alerted the Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C. to the method's possibilities.

Dr. Grant Darkow, professor of Atmospheric Sciences of the University of Missouri, said, "I am encouraged by this. Utilization of electrical detection of tornadoes is not new. We must ascertain whether all tornadoes discharge electricity and will light up a television screen."

Allen Pearson, director of the National Severe Storm and Forecast Center, and Col. Robert Miller, both of Kansas City, are enthusiastic. The latter supervised the now-discontinued Air Force "sferics" net, of radar and oscilloscope stations to locate tornadoes in a 600-700-mile Midwestern area. Pearson says he believes "further engineering checks should be made to determine whether a tornado funnel really is like a vacuum tube and whether all tornadoes have electrical discharges."

John Beeston, an Iowan whose expertise is communications and broadcasting, says, "Equipment should be set up to investigate pulse distribution versus frequency to determine if the 55-megacycle band is the correct maximum, if there is a maximum."

Least excited, probably, is "Tornado" Jones - Dr. Herbert L. Jones - recently retired professor of electrical engineering at Oklahoma State University. Discoverer of the pulse generator in tornadoes in 1955, he does not discount Weller's finding, but believes that with radar, a cathode-ray oscilloscope and a 150-kilo-cycle direction-finder (equipment he uses), tornadoes can be pinpointed to within 1 1/2 miles and warning given by other means. It's his opinion that some tornadoes do not have pulse generators.

With all the flurry the Weller Method has caused, many people now ask: "What is Weller getting out of this financially?" Nothing. His answer is: "How can you possibly measure in terms of financial rewards the satisfaction and happiness a man receives out of giving something to the world that will save lives?"