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History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

35 

 

 

 

 
“The Ozone of Patriotism”: 

Meteorology, Electricity, and the Body in the Nineteenth-Century  
Yellowstone Region 

 
 

Kelsey Matson 
kelsey.matson@msu.montana.edu  

Montana State University 
 

 

 

 

This paper speaks to the theme of this special issue of History of Meteorology by “relocating 
meteorology” in three ways.  First, it geographically re-centers meteorology in the Rocky 
Mountain West of the late nineteenth century, placing particular attention on the Yellowstone 
region.  Yellowstone has long been connected with advances in the biological sciences, but little 
scholarship examines the role of either meteorological or electrical science in the region.1 Second, 
it repositions meteorology thematically by contextualizing it within the development of popular 
and scientific discourses on the physics of electricity and electrochemistry.  Finally, it relocates 
meteorology within the emplaced and material human body by examining qualitative accounts of 
bodily encounters with atmospheric electricity published in scientific and technical journals.2 

The primary thesis is twofold.  First, rather than being rejected in favor of more objective 
meteorological instruments, the human body and its subjective sensory experiences were crucial 
components of the scientist-explorer’s toolkit.  Especially in the study of meteorology and 
atmospheric electricity, the body served as a remarkably sensitive and useful tool.  Furthermore, 
these subjective bodily experiences were published in respected scientific journals and were 
largely accepted by the scientific community as valid technical data.  Theories of electricity, as it 

                                                             
1 For a history of science in the park, see Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks (New Haven: 
Yale, 1997): 3. 
2 This article uses the term “atmospheric electricity” in roughly the sense in which it appeared in Victorian-era parlance, 
to refer to an atmosphere charged with static electricity as to be detected by the senses or by mechanical 
instrumentation.  Although the definition has not changed significantly, this term is uncommon today. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

36 

existed in both the lab and the sky, were in flux and highly contested at this time, and where 
mechanical apparatuses failed, the senses could sometimes succeed. 

Secondly, this article suggests that these visceral and phenomenal experiences with 
atmospheric electricity, as interpreted through the lens of science, helped to solidify in Americans’ 
minds a deep and intrinsic connection between the human body and the electrical Yellowstone 
landscape with ozone acting as the physiological mechanism of action.  This cutting-edge science 
bolstered and lent scientific credence to the discourse of Yellowstone as a healthful climate.  
Examined through this narrative, Yellowstone’s early history is as much a part of the histories of 
meteorology and medical climatology as it is tourism and conservation.  

This work is indebted to the rich and comprehensive literature on the history of 
meteorological observation in the nineteenth century.  Perhaps most salient to this study is 
Katherine Anderson’s Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology.  
Anderson explores the tension between the institutionalized and formalized science of 
meteorology in the late-Victorian era, and the informal and highly local “weather wisdom” of 
everyday Victorians: “Because it was perceived as a form of automatic operation, weather wisdom 
was akin to the tools of modern science.”  This study differs from Anderson’s, however, by 
attributing a kind of embodied weather wisdom not only to the uneducated and the “roughest 
sorts,” but to highly-trained experts as well. 3 Jeremy Vetter tells a similar story in Field Life: 
Science in the American West during the Railroad Era.  Vetter shows how the peculiar contexts 
of Western geography, infrastructure, and social networks shaped scientific knowledge, and how 
that knowledge in turn shaped western landscapes.4  Electricity, in both the lab and in nature also 
bears a significant historical literature.  Daniel French’s recent book, When they Hid the Fire: A 
History of Electricity and Invisible Energy in America explores the efforts of late-nineteenth 
century Americans to grapple culturally and intellectually with electricity’s intangibility. Michael 
Brian Schiffer brings together electricity, environment, science, and the body in Draw the 
Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment.5 

In its theoretical and methodological approach, this article is in dialogue with several 
emerging and interrelated bodies of literature.  Most notably, this article is influenced by 
continuing trans-disciplinary conversations surrounding the dual theoretical approaches of 
phenomenology and materiality studies.  In recent years, historians of science have increasingly 
looked to the psychological dimensions and constructed nature of objectivity as an epistemological 
goal.6  Relatedly, the role of sensory perception in the making of knowledge has also come to the 

                                                             
3 Katherine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 2005), 177. 
4 Jeremy Vetter, Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh 
Press, 2016). 
5 Michael Brian Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of 
Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 
6 For example: Lorraine Daston, “On Scientific Observation,” Isis 99, No. 1 (March 2008): 97-110; Lorraine Daston 
and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Boston: Zone Books, 2010). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

37 

fore in the history of science, dovetailing with a broader turn towards critical histories of the 
senses.7  Although less frequently used in studies of history, the philosophical and methodological 
tools of phenomenology and spatial-cultural theory, long used in the adjacent fields of geography 
and anthropology, have informed this article’s interpretation of the embodied and environmentally 
contextual nature of lived experiences.  A branch of epistemology, phenomenology suggests that 
an understanding of the external world of environment and landscape cannot be separated from 
the experiential reality of inhabiting a living, material body.8 

Similarly, innovative approaches in critical theory, materiality studies, and network theory 
have further problematized the construct of subject/object dualism.  Like sensory and 
phenomenological approaches, a material interpretation of knowledge creation is inherently 
transdisciplinary.  Scholars from across fields have approached the questions of the non-human 
and the material from diverse angles.9  In the 1980s and 1990s, Latour and Law’s Actor Network 
Theory was instrumental in illustrating how human and non-humans actants shaped history 
collectively.10  Subsequent theorists reframed and reassembled its general principles in various 
ways.  The work of Ian Bogost and Jane Bennett, particularly her work on assemblage theory and 
electricity, influenced this study.11  

                                                             
7 For a general overview of sensory history see Mark M. Smith, Sensory History (Berkeley: University of California 
Press, 2008).  Smith is also the series editor of the “Studies in Sensory History” series from the University of Illinois 
Press.  Though not strictly a sensory history, Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University 
of California Press, 2007) looks to the neurochemical processes that shape history.  Regarding subjectivity and the 
senses in scientific inquiry, see Dorindra Outram, “On Being Perseus: New Knowledge, Dislocation, and 
Enlightenment Exploration” in Geography and Enlightenment, David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Simon Schaffer, “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal 
Equation,” Science in Context 2, no. 1 (April 1988):  115-45; Christopher J. Phillips, “The Taste Machine: Sense, 
Subjectivity, and Statistics in the California Wine World,” Social Studies of Science 46, no. 3 (June 1, 2016): 461-81; 
Steven Shapin “A Taste of Science: Making the Subjective Objective in the California Wine World,” Social Studies 
of Science 46, no. 3 (June 1, 2016): 436-60; and Steven Shapin, Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced 
by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority 
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 
8 As a philosophy, phenomenology has its roots in the work of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice 
Merleau-Ponty.  In the 1970s, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan was instrumental in bringing it to contemporary scholarship in 
a practical and accessible way.  See Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 1977).  More recent examples include: John Wylie, “A single day’s walking: narrating 
self and landscape on the South West Coast Path,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 2 (June 
2005): 234-247; Hayden Lorimer, “Telling small stories: spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography” 
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, no 2 (June 2003): 197-218; and Tyra A. Olstad, Zen of the 
Plains: Experiencing Wild Western Places (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2014). 
9 For example, Sophia Roosth explores the subjectivity of yeast cells in “Screaming Yeast: Sonocytology, Cytoplasmic 
Milieus, and Cellular Subjectivities,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 3 (2009): 332-50. 
10 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge: Harvard 
University Press, 1987); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2005). 
11 Ian Bogost. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 
2012; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Jane 
Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17(3): 445–65. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

38 

This paper begins with a brief assessment of the conceptual roots of environmental 
electricity.  Then, it will turn to a core case study emerging from the Yellowstone region of 
Wyoming Territory in 1871.  Next, it will move to a comparative analysis of several other 
descriptions of bodily encounters with electrical storms in the Rocky Mountains.  Finally, it will 
explore two ideas: the linking of electricity and the chemical ozone, and the shift in popular 
perception of the Rockies’ electrical climate from fearsome to healthful.  Ultimately, this article 
seeks to show some of the ways that the wild landscape of the Rocky Mountains and its uniquely 
electrical climate moved—both bodily and psychologically—those who sought to understand it in 
the late ninetieth and early twentieth centuries.   

 

Electrical America 

 

Across cultures, humans have long been aware of the physiological effects of lightning and other 
atmospheric phenomena on organic bodies.12  Lightning has played a major role in nearly every 
ancient culture and religion, and modern society continues to engender stories, myths, and other 
philosophies regarding its origins, behavior, and meaning.  The Nez Perce of the northern Rocky 
Mountains, as well as other indigenous groups, described tremendous and powerful mythological 
Thunderbirds, whose eyes flashed lighting and wings created thunder.  Antagonizing a 
Thunderbird could easily result in the untimely demise of a foolish individual.13  Modern science 
did not stray far from this idea.  Lightning and other forms of electricity had significant power 
over organic bodies in a variety of ways.  Ideas about the sources, operational mechanisms, and 
effects of that electricity became increasingly complex and contested over time.  Paradoxically, 
electricity appeared to be both innate to the body and necessary for life, yet too much of it could 
prove fatal. 

Nineteenth-century scientists recognized that electricity existed atmospherically and 
played an important role in the expression of climatological and meteorological phenomena.  
Benjamin Franklin’s famed 1752 kite experiment had cemented the unity of lighting with 
laboratory-produced sparks, and the work of subsequent meteorologists further reinforced these 
notions.14  To what extent and in what ways atmospheric electricity influenced weather and climate 
was a subject of significant debate throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however.  
Scientists proposed electricity’s involvement in everything from wind currents, cloud formation, 

                                                             
12 Mary Ann Cooper, et al., “Lightning Injuries,” in Wilderness Medicine, Ed. Paul S. Auerbach (Maryland Heights, 
MO: Mosby, 2001), 
13 Roy G. Willis, ed., World Mythology, (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1993), 225. 
14 J. Alan Chalmers, Atmospheric Electricity (London: Pergamon Press Ltd., 1967), 2. See also, Schiffer, Draw the 
Lightning Down. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

39 

tornadoes, floods, and rainfall,15 to vegetation growth,16 the formation of mineral deposits,17 ball 
lightning, cloudbursts,18 and the aurora borealis.19  Hypotheses regarding the origins of 
atmospheric charge were nearly as numerous.  Friction generated by moving air currents, the 
evaporative component of the water cycle, solar energy and flares,20 the metabolic processes of 
plants,21 and the “latent caloric” that was believed to fill the spaces between atoms of water were 
all considered to be scientifically plausible causal factors.22 

Science of the nineteenth century reached few sure consensuses regarding the mysterious 
role of “electric fluid” in shaping climate and weather patterns.  It was known that its influence 
was substantial, but scientists also generally conceded that “electrical conditions of the air do not 
seem to have any simple relation to one another.”23  Despite atmospheric electricity’s propensity 
to defy scientific explanation, one further generalization tended to be agreed upon: certain 
geographic regions were more prone to higher atmospheric potential energy, as well as its 
accompanying spectacular phenomena.  M. J. Fournot, a French specialist in the meteorology of 
thunderstorms, termed these places “electric countries,” determining that many such electric 
countries existed in the Americas, most notably the United States and its territorial possessions.24  
Throughout its expansive geography, the United States seemed to demonstrate what Fournot and 
other Europeans interpreted as an excess of atmospheric electricity.   

 In a 1795 tour of the United States, French philosophe Constantin François de 
Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, remarked that he perceived the country to possess a greater 
intensity and abundance of robust static electricity in the atmosphere, even in the absence of 
storms, as compared to the European continent.  “This difference may be made perceptible to the 
senses at any time, without any complicated apparatus,” he noted, awestruck, in his 1804 
publication, Tableau du climat et du sol des États-Unis.  Superior vividness of lightning and 
loudness of thunder further evidenced this difference, as “the electric fluid appeared to me so 
copious, that all the air was on fire. Its arrowy and zigzag lines were broader and longer than any 
I had ever before seen, and so strong were the pulsations of this fluid, that they seemed to my ear 
and my face like the wind produced by the wings of some passing bird.”25  Yale professor of 
natural philosophy Elias Loomis further described related phenomena, noting the frustrating 
                                                             
15 Charles L. Hogeboom, “What is a Cloud-Burst?” The Outlook (July 7, 1894): 13-14. 
16 Constantin-François Volney, A View of the Soil and climate of the United States of America, trans. Charles Brockden 
Brown (Philadelphia: J. Conrad & Co., 1804), 199. 
17 Rossiter W. Raymond, Statistics of Mines and Mining in the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains 
(Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1873), 502. 
18 Hogeboom, 13-14. 
19 Reuben Phillips, “On the Aurora” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 8 (1856-1857): 214-15. 
20 Amédée Guillemin, Electricity and Magnetism, ed. Silvanus P. Thompson (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1891), 
534-35. 
21 George M. Beard, “Atmospheric Electricity and Ozone: Their Relation to Health and Disease” The Popular Science 
Monthly 4, no. 25 (Feb. 1874): 463. 
22 “Atmospheric Electricity,” The Knickerbocker 4 (1834): 464. 
23 Thomas Russell, Meteorology: Weather, and Methods of Forecasting (New York: MacMillan Company, 1906), 81. 
24 Guillemin, 537. 
25 Volney, 198. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

40 

tendency for free-floating bits of dust and lint to affix themselves to the body via electrical cling.  
Carpeting similarly elicited “little crackling noises” and sparks, the charge from which could be 
transferred back and forth between the body and surrounding objects: “You can sometimes even 
light a gas jet with your finger after having shuffled along on the insulating carpet.”26  
Professionalizing Humboldtian scientists increasingly fetishized scientific instruments and their 
uncanny ability to render Nature’s hidden processes detectible.  Instrumentation, and its delicate 
calibrations, was at the heart of Humboldtian scientific identity. 27  The rugged nature of the 
American environment itself rendered these technologies notably difficult to handle in the field.  

 Volney and Loomis easily sensed a preponderance of electrical charge in the New England 
atmosphere, but those who explored the continent’s high and dry interior found the phenomenon 
amplified by an order of magnitude.  Nowhere was it more pronounced than along the north-south 
wrinkle formed by the geological dividing line of the Rocky Mountains.  Despite the many 
mysteries surrounding atmospheric electricity and the lack of any mathematical law governing its 
expression, atmospheric scientists unquestionably agreed that the voltage potential of the air 
increased with height.28  The Rocky Mountains, with their quintuple-digit elevations, seemed to 
be Nature’s dramatic organic “laboratories” in which one might test this phenomenon.29 

Of the Rockies’ numerous geological and environmental curiosities, the most “unnatural”30 
and “freakish”31 was nearly always agreed to be the Yellowstone region of northwest Wyoming 
Territory.  Although popular and scientific interest regarding the Yellowstone area has historically 
tended to gravitate towards its remarkable geological and geothermal features, the region is replete 
with a wide variety of exceptional organic and environmental processes.  Not only its peculiar 
geothermal activity, but also its driving rivers, blistering wildfires, scorching summer sunshine, 
and torrential thunderstorms all served as testament to the dynamic, energetic, and ephemeral 
nature of the Yellowstone environment.   

Voyagers to the area, scientists and amateurs alike, did not overlook the latter of these 
features. Numerous traveler narratives recount tales of the region’s dramatic summer 
thunderstorms with a combination of sublime awe and anxiety.  In an 1859 meteorological survey 
of the territory, Army Corps of Engineers Brigadier General W. F. Raynolds recorded a strange 
mixed weather event in which “a storm of mingled rain, snow and hail, accompanied with vivid 
lightning and heavy peals of thunder” emerged from behind the nearby mountains, “which were 

                                                             
26 Guillemin, 537-8. 
27 D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 93.  See also: William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and 
the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1993), 303-4 and Susan 
Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Science History Publications, 1978), 103. 
28 Russell, 123. 
29 Frank B. King, “In Nature’s Laboratory: Driving and Fishing in Yellowstone Park,” Overland Monthly 29, no. 2 
(June 1897): 594. 
30 Ferdinand V. Hayden, Bulletin of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories 
(Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1873), 54. 
31 Edwin J. Stanley, Rambles in Wonderland or Up the Yellowstone (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1883), 62. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

41 

shrouded in the densest clouds, while ahead the sun continued to shine brightly and its rays were 
brilliantly reflected from the snow-clad peaks before us, unveiled by any apparent vapors.”32  
Nathanial Pitt Langford of the famed 1870 Washburn expedition remembered “terrific tempests, 
with all the incidental accompaniments of thunder [and] lightning…afford the most awe-inspiring 
exhibition in nature.”33 Six years later, Captain Daniel C. Pearson of the Second Cavalry recounted 
somewhat less enthusiastically the “terrible violence” of frequent, drenching nighttime 
thunderstorms.34 Visitors to Yellowstone often readily identified lightning storms and other 
electrical phenomena as defining features of its landscape, often noting their brutality and unusual 
characteristics. 

But the magnificent and sublime effects of atmospheric electricity extended beyond the 
landscape, permeating the human body itself.  Visceral encounters with electricity were, according 
to Amédée Guillemin in 1891, “not rare in high mountains, without however being frequent.”35  
Descriptions of the bodily effects of high-altitude climatological electricity abound in 
contemporary scientific literature, but nowhere was the anomaly more extensively recorded, nor 
the descriptions more dramatic than in the Rocky Mountains, where explorers and surveyors 
believed that circumstances combined to make the area “singularly favorable to the study of 
condensation of [vapors] and concentration of electric currents.”36  Although the specific language 
describing the experiences varied, the general experience remained remarkably consistent.  As 
meteorologists and geographers attempted to objectively survey mountaintops throughout the 
Rocky Mountains, the sensory reality that the body manifested became at times even more salient 
and meaningful than mechanical instrumentation.  Mountaintop scientists could not ignore the 
reality that atmospheric electricity enthralled the entire corporeal body, stimulating all five senses, 
plus the uncanny sixth sense of the sublime. 

The 1871 Hayden Geological Survey, led by University of Pennsylvania geology professor 
Ferdinand Hayden, saw one such event.  Hayden handpicked his team members, 32 in all, from 
his friends and colleagues.  Many were college-educated, bringing expertise in numerous scientific 
and technical disciplines, including geography, geology, cartography, mineralogy, botany, 
zoology, ornithology, and photography, among others.37  Geographer Henry Gannett worked 

                                                             
32 W. F. Raynolds, Report on the Exploration of the Yellowstone River (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 
1868), 91. 
33 Nathaniel Pitt Langford, Diary of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870 
(St. Paul: Nathaniel Pitt Langford, 1905), 9. 
34 Daniel C. Pearson, “Military Notes” Journal of the United States Cavalry Association 12, no. 41 (March 1899), 305. 
35 Guillemin, 542. 
36 Frederic M. Endlich, “Electric Phenomena in the Rocky Mountains,” The Penn Monthly 6 (June, 1875): 405. 
37 Aubrey L. Haines, Yellowstone National Park: Its Exploration and Establishment (Washington D.C.: Government 
Printing Office, 1974), 98.  Historians of science have contextualized the institution of exploratory expeditions within 
the contexts of experimental observation and the mechanisms of state power.  For example: Kohler, Landscapes and 
Labscapes, and Expeditions as Experiments: Practicing Observation and Documentation, ed. Marianne Klemun and 
Ulrike Spring (London: Palgrave, 2016) examine the intellectual and geographic spaces of knowledge creation.  
Marlene Deahl Merrill, ed., Yellowstone and the Great West-Journals, Letters and Images from the 1871 Hayden 
Expedition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 31–3. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

42 

directly under Hayden, his responsibilities including gathering meteorological, astronomical, and 
hypsometric data on the Yellowstone.  Although only 25 at the time of the Yellowstone excursion, 
his colleagues already lauded Gannett for his pioneering cartographic style and talent for 
disseminating geographic knowledge and nurturing a popular appreciation of it.38  Assisting 
Gannett were various other technical specialists, each of whom was handpicked by Hayden.  
Although he held a medical degree, 21-year-old Dr. Albert Peale never practiced medicine, but 
rather served as the expedition’s chief mineralogist.39 Also accompanying the party was 
mechanical engineer Alexander E. Brown.40  The Hayden Expedition was an opportunity not only 
to put their newly-earned professional credentials to use, but also to test themselves physically, 
pushing their bodies to the limit on the six-week backcountry excursion. 

 

Rocky Mountain Science and the Electrical Body 

 

On July 15th in the sultry summer of 1872, the team set out for the Yellowstone from Fort Ellis in 
southwest Montana Territory. Gannett was responsible for an array of scientific instruments, 
including an assortment of various types and sensitivities of barometers, thermometers, and other 
accoutrements.  Astronomical observations required an additional set of entirely different devices, 
including telescopes, chronometers, and sextants.  Gannett complained of the fallibility of these 
instruments, some of which “got out of order” to the extent that they were “of no use on the trip.”41  
Despite these setbacks, he and his team did their duty, collecting such an abundance of 
meteorological statistics—including hourly measurements of barometric pressure; dry bulb, wet 
bulb, and dew point temperature; relative humidity; wind velocity and direction; and cloud 
character—that they had to be published in an additional volume printed separately from the 
survey’s primary report.42 

In the expedition’s comprehensive technical report, Gannett recounted “a rather singular 
experience” that he faced in common with Brown and Peale.43 In the afternoon of July 26th, 1872, 
the group clambered up a mountain near the Gardiner’s River Springs, hauling with them a 
cumbersome and unwieldy variety of gear. 

 

                                                             
38 N.H. Darton, "Memoir of Henry Gannett," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 7 (Jan. 1917): 68. 
39 Henry Brown Floyd Macfarland, District of Columbia: concise biographies of its prominent and representative 
contemporary citizens, and valuable statistical data (Washington D.C.: The Potomac Press, 1908): 364. 
40 Paul Latzke, “The Unknown Captains of Industry,” The Saturday Evening Post 174, no. 51 (June 21, 1902): 6. 
41 Ferdinand V. Hayden, Sixth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, (Washington 
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), 795-7. 
42 Ibid, 806. 
43 Albert Peale. “Friday, July 26th.” Diary. Page 18, YELL 2466, Museum Collection, Heritage and Research Center, 
Yellowstone National Park. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

43 

A thunder-shower was approaching as we neared the summit of the mountain.  I 
was above the others of the party, and when about 50 feet below the summit the 
electric current began to pass through my body.  At first I felt nothing, but heard a 
crackling noise, similar to a rapid discharge of sparks from a friction machine. 
Immediately after, I began to feel a tingling or prickling sensation in my head and 
the ends of my fingers, which, as well as the noise, increased rapidly, until, when I 
reached the top, the noise, which had not changed its character, was deafening, and 
my hair stood completely on end, while the tingling, pricking sensation was 
absolutely painful.  Taking off my hat partially relieved it.  I started down again, 
and met the others 25 or 30 feet below the summit.  They were affected similarly, 
but in a less degree.  One of them attempted to go to the top, but had proceeded but 
a few feet when he received quite a severe shock, which felled his as if he had 
stumbled.  We then returned down the mountain about 300 feet, and to this point 
we still heard and felt the electricity.44 

 

That evening, Peale recounted the experience in his diary:   

 

We reached the summit of the peak about 4 o’clock. There was a strong cloud all 
about us.  Gannett was a little ahead and we saw him hurrying back to us with his 
hair standing on end.  As he neared us we could hear a crackling noise as though 
there were a lot of frictional electrical machines all about him.  We soon began to 
feel it ourselves.  Gannett said [that when] he got to the summit the electricity was 
so strong that he was obliged to put down the gradienter & hurry down.  Brown 
tried to go up and get it but got a shock on the top of his head and came back in a 
hurry also.  We then descended about 100 feet having the noise all about us as 
though there were a lot of electrical machines about us.45 

 

The eerie and awesome experience on the mountain that day so inspired Gannett that he 
subsequently christened the mountain Electric Peak, a toponym it retains to this day.46  If the Earth 
in its entirety was “an immense Galvanic pile, forever in action, under the guidance of 
unchangeable laws,”47 then Electric Peak was a “giant storage battery,” or a “huge Leyden jar.”48  
That Gannett chose to document this experience alongside the rest of his technical and quantitative 
data is revealing.  He interpreted the qualitative experience of his electrified and instrumentalized 
                                                             
44 Hayden, Sixth Annual Report, 807. 
45 Peale. 
46 Ibid. 
47 “Atmospheric Electricity,” 466. 
48 Burton Holmes, “The Yellowstone National Park,” Travelogues 12 (Chicago: The Travelogue Bureau, 1914), 29-
30. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

44 

body to be as scientifically meaningful as the reams of numerical data that his mechanical 
implements provided. 

 Peculiar and unsettling as encounters with high-altitude atmospheric electricity were, they 
were not uncommon, and scientists and other technical specialists who chanced upon them 
sometimes went on to document the experience in professional journals and other publications, 
often describing it with significant literary flourish.  Such encounters with atmospheric electricity 
were profoundly corporeal experiences that gripped and enthralled all five senses in a variety of 
unexpected ways. In its most dramatic manifestation, electricity literally possessed the body, 
sending sparks flying from fingertips and stealing away the voluntary control of muscle movement.  
Dangerous and frightening as they were, such experiences were dramatic and visceral 
demonstrations of the physical power of wild western landscapes, as well as the occult power of 
Nature’s electricity.  The weather and landscapes of Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountains were 
clearly and demonstrably linked with the human body, and electricity was the bridge that merged 
them. 

Furthermore, the men of science who encountered high-altitude atmospheric electricity 
perceived their bodies as legitimate instruments for logical inquiry, should opportunity arise.  They 
presented their findings professionally, sometimes publishing on the experience in government 
reports and scientific journals. Rife with metaphor and rhetorical flourish, however, this data was 
worlds away from that of Gannett with his reams of charts and statistics.  Where mechanical 
technologies of data-collecting failed, like Gannett’s faulty chronometers and barometers-cum-
lightning rods, the human body, replete with all of its subjective sensory idiosyncrasies, could be 
a valid substitute.   

In at least some circumstances, the body was perhaps even better than any mechanical 
apparatus for studying atmospheric electricity.  Mechanical instruments for the detection and 
measurement of atmospheric electricity existed at this time, including an array of various 
electroscopes and electrometers, and the meteorological and scientific literature of the day 
typically described such mechanisms at length.  These devices were fragile, cumbersome, and 
often required priming with an electrical charge transferred from an electrophorus or other outside 
source.  If this priming charge dissipated, the apparatus lost efficacy, so many such instruments 
also relied on drying agents such as calcium chloride to counteract ambient humidity.  Some also 
incorporated clockwork or photographic elements for recording purposes.49  Such contraptions 
made field research difficult, if not impossible, and thus quantitative studies of mountain electricity 
were quite rare in the nineteenth century.  Ironically, the imponderable fluid that orthodox science 
struggled to capture or describe could perhaps be best understood through the bodies and senses 
of Rocky Mountain explorers. 

                                                             
49 Negretti and Zambra, A treatise on meteorological instruments: explanatory of their scientific principles, method of 
construction, and practical utility (London: Williams and Strahan, 1864), 129-135. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

45 

In addition to those from Gannett and Peale, the following discussion focuses on seven 
such case studies of encounters with atmospheric electricity in the Rocky Mountain West, each 
published in a scientific or technical publication.  Six of the seven date from the years 1873 to 
1884; one temporal outlier dates from 1911 quoting a source from 1909.  Each describes one or 
more such events in the Rocky Mountain territories of Colorado or Wyoming.50   

One account refers specifically to Wyoming’s Yellowstone region.  While making 
topographical observations on Electric Peak in 1878, a thunder cloud enveloped cartographer A. 
D. Wilson as one had done to Gannett and company several years prior.  The electricity made his 
scalp prickle, his pencil click with a sharp sound, and produced a “strange burst of mountain 
music.”51  Though Wilson was not a meteorologist, his encounter was so memorable and 
noteworthy, that he included in his report.  Although not explicitly stated in the proceedings, it is 
very likely that Wilson was familiar with the events of the earlier Hayden expedition, and may 
have anticipated the possibility of such an encounter himself. 

Most recorded descriptions of encounters with atmospheric electricity in the Rockies 
occurred just south, however, in neighboring Colorado.  In an 1873 U.S. Geological Survey report 
on mining statistics, mining engineer Rossiter Raymond recounted the experience of colleague and 
fellow engineer George S. Dwight, on Colorado’s Gray’s Peak, which he compared to studies 
conducted in Europe by M. J. Fournot and M. Henri de Sassure in 1867 and 1868 respectively.52  
Two years later, geologist Fredric M. Endlich vividly described his corporeal experiments with 
atmospheric electricity in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains: “this is an opportunity for studying the 
progress of storms.” Contrary to Raymond’s and Guillemin’s assertions that such phenomena were 
of modest frequency, Endlich found them to be so frequent and consistent that such experiments 
could be consistently replicated, ultimately finding these results consistent enough to account for 
the direction and velocity of wind, time of day, and season.53 Within months of the publication of 
Endlich’s article, meteorologist and naturalist J. H. Tice presented the findings of a comparative 
study of atmospheric electrical phenomena to the Illinois State Horticultural Society, declaring  

 

I only state what I have seen heard and felt, on more than on occasion…It was not 
possible to be mistaken, either as to the phenomena or as to the cause of 
them….cloud formation and digestion of a thunder storm were taking place before 
my eyes and I could observe the process in all its minutae and details…my nerves 
were thrilling with an electric current, flowing out at the ends of my erect hair, or 
from my fingers when I raised my hands…the thunder-cloud was digesting and 
rapidly increasing in dimensions and density.  There could be no mistake.  The 

                                                             
50 Colorado gained statehood in 1876.  Wyoming in 1890. 
51 A. D. Wilson, “A Trip through Northwestern Wyoming,” Proceedings of the Newport Natural History Society 2 
(July 1884): 27. 
52 Raymond, 504. 
53 Endlich, 403-409. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

46 

electric charge on the mountain initiated and sustained all these phenomena.  It was 
the cause; they were the sequences [italics in the original].54 

 

For Tice, an embodied and phenomenal experience informed his knowledge of the meteorological 
process of cloud and storm formation.  Paradoxically, only through a fundamentally qualitative 
and personal experience, could Tice come not only to a place of understanding, but one of 
certainty. 

Mirroring Gannett and Peale’s experience on Hayden’s 1871 Yellowstone expedition, A. 
D. Wilson and F. Rhoda, members of the 1877 Hayden topographical expedition through 
Colorado, encountered an electrical storm that produced, upon the raising of a hand, the curiously 
synesthetic effect of a “tickling sound.”  Noting the eerie clicking of a telescope perched on a 
tripod, Rhoda analogized his own curious sensory phenomenon to its comparable effects on his 
party’s technical instrumentation.  He further noted the failures of these instruments under the 
influence of the electrical storm: “an attempt was made to take a barometric observation.  But no 
sooner was the barometer held up than it began to hum most alarmingly, and the telescope and 
tripod was so much affected that the two observers retired a little way down the mountain.”  In this 
instance, the party’s barometer failed to function in its intended capacity, but did convey important 
information about the lightning storm to the surveyors through the physical phenomenon of 
sound.55 

In 1911, physicist Oliver Lester prepared a comparative analysis of Colorado-based 
encounters with atmospheric electricity, concluding that “these experiences usually consist of 
unpleasant buzzing around the head, pulling of the hair, sparks jumping from fingers, etc., all 
indicating a highly charged state of the body.”56  Notably, Lester’s most prominent case study 
came from naturalist Enos A. Mills, best known as the “Father of Rocky Mountain National Park.”  
Singularly amongst these various accounts, Mills described pronounced effects of electricity upon 
the action of his muscles: “I made a clumsy climb of about five hundred feet, my muscles being 
‘muscle-bound’ all the time with rigidity from electricity.” Mills may or may not have exaggerated 
the truth in his account, but physicist Lester took him seriously at his word, concluding that “the 
phenomena of static electricity can have very little to do with modern engineering practice…. they 
have little to do with the constructive side of engineering, but a great deal to do with the destructive 
side.”57  For Lester, environmental electricity was something that could potentially be understood, 
but never controlled. 

Although most of these documented cases were prepared by naturalists or physical 
scientists—geographers, geologists, or engineers—some biological scientists, particularly 
                                                             
54 J. H. Tice, “Meteorology,” Transactions of the Illinois State Horticultural Society (Chicago: Illinois State 
Horticultural Society, 1875): 77-8. 
55 “Singular Electrical Phenomena,” Locomotive Engineers Journal 11, no. 11 (Nov. 1877): 491. 
56 Oliver C. Lester, “Atmospheric Electricity.” The University of Colorado Journal of Engineering 7 (1911): 92. 
57 Lester, 93-4. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

47 

physiologists, also took a keen interest in the area.  Dr. Charles Denison, a specialist in the medical 
climatology of the Rocky Mountain West looked to the region’s restorative climatic and 
geographic properties.58  In his 1880 analysis of the role of environment and weather in the 
establishment of long-term convalescent care facilities, Denison dedicated a full chapter to the 
subject of atmospheric electricity and ozone.  By his assessment, its electrically charged, ozone-
rich atmosphere contributed to making the Rocky Mountains an ideal location to recover from 
pulmonary disease. Though contextualized with research based in the United States and Europe, 
he drew heavily on his own embodied experiences based on high-altitude fieldwork in the 
Colorado Rockies:  

 

“It would seem that, with the increase of tension due to elevation, the positive 
electricity of the air, so abundant in dry elevated regions, would be constantly 
nearing the negative electricity of the earth.  With no other evidence to prove this 
than the experience of our nervous systems as we ascend into electrified strata, and 
the frequency of electrical phenomena there witnessed, I shall incline to the opinion 
that this is the true state of electric tension of high altitudes, till evidence is produced 
to the contrary.”59 

 

Based on evidence gathered with his own nervous system, Denison concluded that the specific 
environmental mechanism that made mountain environments so notably restorative was “the 
continued mediumship of the human body between the negative ground and the positive air…[it] 
is a constant renewal of his vitality.”60 

 Via these seven case studies, a portrait emerges of how scientists, engineers, and doctors 
interpreted the relationship between climate, electricity, and human body in the Rocky Mountain 
West of the 1870s and early 1880s.  Some, such as Endlich and Denison, took repeated scientific 
“readings” with their bodies over an extended period. Those who could not do so tended to turn to 
comparative analyses as an alternative. In fact, each of these examples, save for that of Gannett 
and Peale, took a comparative approach to a greater or lesser extent, some looking abroad to the 
widely-reported studies by Fournnet and de Sassure, while others compared more regionally.  In 
each instance, atmospheric electricity was depicted as frightening and uncanny, but entirely 

                                                             
58 Charles Denison, “Atmospheric Electricity: Ozone and Winds,” in Rocky Mountain Health Resorts (Boston: 
Houghton Mifflin, 1880): 74-80.  Many historians have examined the relationship between science, medicine, and 
environments.  On the topic of medical climatology in tropical climates, see Gregg Mitman, “In Search of Health: 
Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History,” Environmental History 10, no. 2 (2005): 184-201, and 
Mark Carey, “Inventing Caribbean Climates: How Science, Medicine, and Tourism Changed Tropical Weather from 
Deadly to Healthy” Osiris 26, no. 1 (2011): 129-41.  Regarding Rocky Mountain Health Resorts, see: Tom Sherlock, 
Colorado's Healthcare Heritage: A Chronology of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume One - 1800-1899; 
Nancy Owen Lewis, Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health. 
59 Denison, 74-5. 
60 Ibid, 75. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

48 

fathomable through the tool of a body controlled by a scientific mind.  Through corporeal 
experimentation, natural electricity could be understood and, they hoped, bent to serve human 
needs and desires through technology, medicine, and tourism. 

 

The “Child of Lightning” 

 

The smell of acid accompanied by a peculiar taste of lobster that many mountain surveyors 
experienced was conjured by a gas that, though known since the time of Homer, had only recently 
been described by science.61  First isolated in 1839 by Christian Friedrich Schönbein, who named 
it for the Greek word ozein meaning "to smell,” in reference to its strong and peculiar “electric 
odor,” the chemical formula of ozone (O3) was not determined until 1865.  Laboratory 
experimentation had established a close relationship between ozone and electricity as the chemical 
could be derived from common air by passing an electric spark through it, while field research 
corroborated that the chemical was produced during thundershowers.62  It was this latter source, 
lightning, that appeared to be essential to organic processes, leading one specialist to conclude that 
“ozone is a child of the lightning.”63  Termed “active oxygen” 64 for its intense oxidizing properties 
that were believed to “stimulate,” “purify,” and “disinfect” the blood and the flesh, ozone was 
thought to be congenial to life, its presence integral to human health.65 

Like the electricity that created it, ozone could be produced synthetically in a laboratory 
and put to use industrially as, for example, a disinfectant or bleaching agent.   Contemporary 
scholars interpreted it as first and foremost a product of Nature, however, and, by extension, a 
healthful and necessary addition to the human body.66  Ozone was suspected to affect the pulse, 
respiration, and circulation in various ways, and “in this respect, it behaves like electricity.”  
Medical science further suggested that the passage of a mild electrical current directly through the 
body could electrochemically produce these benefits from the inside out, but such a technique was 
not medically practicable at this time; bodies remained dependent on atmospheric sources of 
ozone.67   

Like Fournot’s electric countries, certain places seemed to be blessed with an abundance 
of ozone.  Chief among these were elevated, thunderstorm-prone regions (oceanic and shoreline 

                                                             
61 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Walter Leaf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 172. 
62 “American Contributions to Science,” United States Magazine, 4 (1857), 47. 
63 Brigham, “Ozone,” 260. 
64 “American Contributions to Science,” 47. 
65 Brigham, “Ozone” 260-1. 
66 E. Andreoll, “Ozone: Its Commercial Production and Application,” Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry 16 
(Feb 27, 1897), 95.  For more on Schönbein’s isolation of the chemical, see Mordecai B. Rubin, “The History of 
Ozone: The Schonbein Period, 1839-1868” Bulletin of the History of Chemistry 26, no. 1 (2001): 40-56.  Robert 
Kohler discusses the development of medical biochemistry as a field in From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: 
The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 
67 Beard, 464. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

49 

environments were also believed to be healthful and ozone-rich, although later science 
demonstrated the pungent smell of sea air to be not ozone, but rotting seaweed).  Grimy urban 
areas were believed to be ozone deficient because as the chemical disinfected and purified putrid 
matter, it became depleted, losing its power of oxidation: “it dies, that others may live.”68  Both 
medical and popular literature suggested that living in an ozone-deficient environment, such as a 
busy urban cityscape, would deprive one of exposure to this seemingly essential, life-giving 
ambient chemical.  Thus divested, a person would sicken and die.  As one sensationalist popular 
magazine put it: 

 

Thus is man often where he least expects it, the creature of physical influences, 
which, unseen, but no less actual, brood on the passing wing of a vivific or a 
pestiferous air; that slumber in the shadows of the clouds, or crawl like invisible 
reptiles upon the earth; that drop upon him in the noiseless exaltations of shrubs 
and trees, and even haunt him, as ministers of life and death, in the very aroma and 
in the nameless qualities that distinguish dwellings, localities, and countries from 
one another.  We are penetrated through and through with natural laws; and if 
Nature fail for a brief period to furnish around us a due supply of disturbed electric 
action, of new-wrought and avid oxygen, or of we know not how many other 
essential elements of vigorous life, we droop, sicken and die; and the "mourners go 
about the streets" for those who fell ostensibly of rheums, and typhus, and cholera, 
but really of vast and uncontrollable revulsions in the operations of Nature herself.69 

 

Neither professional nor popular literature left any doubt that the body’s health was enormously 
dependent upon the health of its surrounding climate and environment, and electricity was 
absolutely essential for a vigorous life. 

Scientists and others believed ozone influenced not only the fitness of the corporeal body, 
but also an individual’s personality and his or her mental and moral hygiene.  “Who shall say that 
even ozone does not modify the play of ambition or avarice, of love, of patriotism, or of crime?” 
speculated one contemporary social critic.70  Even a city as a collective whole was vulnerable to 
the dangers of insufficient levels of sterilizing atmospheric ozone, which was hypothesized to 
affect everything from activity and enterprise, to the moral, social and aesthetic life of a 
metropolis’s citizenry.  Beginning in the latter two decades of the nineteenth century, a discourse 
emerged that specifically analogized ozone with a variety of desirable, masculine, and energetic 
qualities, leading to rhetoric of “the ozone of town spirit,”71 “ozone of the national ambition,”72 
                                                             
68 Ibid, 464. 
69 “American Contributions to Science,” 48. 
70 Brigham, 49. 
71 George Blackstone Irving, My Town; Or Community Patriotism (Chicago: The Rogerson Press, 1912), 94. 
72 Mortimer Thomson, The Divine Comedy of Patriotism (New York: Press of Duane Printing Company, 1900), 153. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

50 

and “the ozone of patriotism.”73  Atmospheric ozone was nothing short of a vital necessity for a 
modern, sanitary, civic society, and meteorological science was the means to quantify it. 

Thus, electricity and ozone had become so deeply correlated in the late nineteenth-century 
mind as to be functionally inseparable in both popular and scientific discourses.  In covering the 
science of medical geography, many scientific publications, including The New York Medical 
Journal74 and The Popular Science Monthly,75 correlated and conflated the two concepts, referring 
generally to “atmospheric electricity and ozone.”76  To be electric was to be ozonated, and vice 
versa.  Moreover, these qualities—electrification and ozonation—were interpreted as 
fundamentally natural climatic processes innate to both the organic environment and the human 
body.  Although they could be replicated in the laboratory, they were first and foremost processes 
and products of Nature.   

Viewed through this lens, venturing to Yellowstone was not only recreation, personal 
enrichment, or the nationalistic appropriation of a distant land.  It was the application of 
meteorological science to human health and well-being, touted to have profound benefits in nearly 
every aspect of life, from physical health and wellness to patriotism and work ethic.  In the eyes 
of a typical middle or upper-class tourist of the time, the re-creative effects of a Yellowstone tour 
would make him a more efficient cog in the capitalist political economy once he returned home.  
Experiencing Yellowstone came to be interpreted as a type of modern, scientific medical 
procedure.  Nor was it seen as a sham treatment; it was based on cutting-edge medical science that 
identified specific physiological mechanisms, including ozonation, for the transmission of 
atmospheric electricity’s healthful effects.   

Modern meteorological and electrical science and the cultural development of Yellowstone 
occurred contemporaneously, from the 1870s through about 1910, with the American sanitarium 
movement joining them in 1885.  The case study of Yellowstone was thus an important antecedent 
and related cultural development to that of “health stations,” “health resorts,” and “sanitariums.” 
Such facilities were intended for the treatment of tuberculosis and other ailments throughout the 
Rocky Mountains, and have been the subject of much historical scholarship.  Many such histories 
neglect the importance of atmospheric electricity and ozone to the therapeutic process, however, 
instead focusing on the climatic features of warmth, sunlight, and dryness.77  Electricity’s 
importance must not be overlooked, however, as references to electricity and ozone abound in 
contemporary medical literature like Denison’s.78 

                                                             
73 Journal of the Twenty-Eighth Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic (Boston: E. B. Stillings & Co., 1894), 
262. 
74 Charles Denison, “The Annual and Seasonal Climatic Maps of the United States,” The New York Medical Journal 
42 (Dec. 5, 1885): 629. 
75 Beard, 456. 
76 Ibid. 
77 Daniel Freund, American Sunshine: Diseases of Darkness and the Quest for Natural Light (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 2012), 70.  Jeremy Agnew, Medicine in the Old West: A History, 1850-1900 (Jefferson: McFarland, 
2010), 75. 
78 Denison, 74-80. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

51 

Yellowstone Park thus offered access to an energetic, invigorating, and healthful climate 
for those middle-class Americans not looking for the directed attention provided at dedicated 
sanitariums or convalescent facilities. In Our National Parks, John Muir suggested that those weak 
of constitution ought to “try to climb Electric Peak when a big, bossy, well-charged thunder-cloud 
is on it, to try to breathe the ozone set free, and kindly get yourself shaken and shocked,” apparently 
providing this advice with genuine sincerity.79   In describing the region “as a health resort,” 
physicians suggested “unimpeachable evidence in favor of Montana climate” for the geographic 
treatment of consumption, malaria, asthma, and rheumatism.80  For these reasons, the American 
Institute of Homeopathy held its 1898 national convention in Yellowstone, noting that “the season 
will be delightful for such excursions, and our visiting doctors and their friends will get so full of 
mountain ozone and patriotic enthusiasm that they will be carried many years beyond the three-
score and ten allotted to man.”81   

Especially in urban areas, mountain imagery dominated popular discussions of ozone’s 
relationship to the body.  Once exposed to popular books and articles on the importance of 
adequate ozone intake, city dwellers now had yet another reason to believe their urban 
environments dangerous and unhealthful.  Fortunately for concerned urbanites, electrical appliance 
manufacturers leaped at the opportunity to fill the gap.  Because it was “not always convenient for 
Mohammad to go to the Mountain,” they developed and marketed a cornucopia of devices and 
contrivances intended to mimic the effects of ozonated mountain air.82  For those who could not 
make the pilgrimage to Yellowstone or the Rocky Mountains, home ozonators provided “pure 
mountain air in your own home.”83  Mohammad no longer needed to go to the mountain to maintain 
his vigor, and the mountain would have to acquire a new meaning if it was to remain relevant in 
the twentieth century. 

 

Conclusion 

 

One of the great ironies of this story is that ozone was not the health-promoting wonder-chemical 
that Gilded Age Americans believed it to be.  It retained its healthful mystique well into the 
twentieth century, but as new evidence came to light and cultural principles shuffled, ideas 
regarding the relationship between body and ozone changed.  Beginning in the mid-nineteen-teens, 
perhaps as a result of accelerating industrialization or the development of chemical weapons, the 
American Medical Association and other such professional bodies reevaluated their positions on 

                                                             
79 John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 59. 
80 Robert E. Strathorn, Montana and Yellowstone National Park (Kansas City: Ramsey, Millet, and Hudson, 1881), 
40-1. 
81 D.A. Foote, “A Plea for Western Pilgrimage,” Medical Century 6, no. 3 (March 1, 1898): 87. 
82 Brigham, 261. 
83 “Ozone Pure Airifier,” The Literary Digest 40, no. 2 (April 16, 1910): 770. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

52 

ozone’s effects.84  Today, all relevant regulatory or advisory entities, including the Environmental 
Protection Agency, World Health Organization, and European Union categorize ozone as an 
atmospheric pollutant, respiratory irritant, and menace to public health.85 

Americans understood electricity less as part of a morally and physically toxic modern 
social regime than as an integral component of the climate’s optimal and balanced functioning.  
American surveyors and explorers further corroborated these theories via their intense and visceral 
encounters with ambient atmospheric electricity in their Rocky Mountain fieldwork.  These 
travelers, typically formally trained in the sciences, approached the phenomena as experimenters. 
Although such climatic events occurred somewhat unpredictably, once met, they could be 
appraised systematically.  The rub was that conventional mechanical instruments for studying 
electricity in the atmosphere were not conducive to the harsh conditions of wildland travel.  In 
practice, however, this “problem” could sometimes be sidestepped through creative use of the 
human body.  Subjective and phenomenal sensory information turned out to be a more sensitive 
and manageable instrument than any manmade apparatus.  Scientist-explorers disseminated the 
data gathered with their bodies in scientific publications and professional arenas, and medical 
experts ultimately reached the conclusion that backcountry travel was a healthful practice 
specifically because it provided for exposure to invigorating and purifying electricity and ozone. 

Hayden and Gannett were not searching for a link between atmospheric electricity and the 
body when they explored Yellowstone.  Such science was too new and too unconnected to the 
conventional goals of surveying for it to be an issue relevant to their purposes.  In the latter decades 
of the nineteenth century, however, the cultural and scientific meanings of Yellowstone National 
Park, as well as those of atmospheric electricity and ozone, developed concurrently and in tandem, 
ultimately forming a cultural tautology.  Yellowstone came to function as a symbol of national and 
individual strength and power because its climate was electric and ozonated.  Conversely, ozone 
signified vitality and purity because it was part and parcel with the ostensibly pristine Yellowstone 
wilderness.   

The case study presented in this article repositions the geographic context, methods, and 
conceptual framework of late nineteenth century meteorological science.  Relocating meteorology 
within material human bodies in the Rocky Mountain West reveals that scientific and popular 
discourses acknowledged and embraced the fundamental and fluid reciprocity between bodies and 
their environs. Positioning the history of meteorology adjacent to and in dialogue with the history 
of the physical science of electricity further complicates conventional historical narratives. The 
lens of electrical science suggests that late-nineteenth century scientists and surveyors saw 
electricity (and, by extension, ozone) as a primary mechanism of action by which climate and 
landscape influenced and shaped the body. Via the mechanisms of atmospheric electricity and 

                                                             
84 Edwin O. Jordan and A. J. Carlson, “Ozone: It’s Bactericidal, Physiologic, and Deodorizing Action,” Journal of the 
American Medical Association 61, no. 13 (Sept. 27, 1913): 1012. 
85 Environmental Protection Agency, “Ground Level Ozone,” March 25, 2015, http://www.epa.gov/air/ozonepollution/ 
(May 1, 2015). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 

53 

ozone, the Rocky Mountain West’s electrical landscapes asserted themselves viscerally upon 
material bodies in the late nineteenth century, thereby reaffirming the salience of the electrical 
human organism in defining and interpreting the region’s place based meteorology and medical 
climatology.  Ultimately, the concept of the electrical body would persist in both scientific and 
popular discourses, while its former companion, the “ozone of patriotism,” fell out of usage. 

 


