Three men were stationed in a wooden shack on the highest peak in the northeastern United States when a storm rolled in that no instrument had ever measured. By the time it passed, they had set a wind speed record that has now stood for more than 90 years.

A Shack Built for the World's Worst Weather

Mount Washington Observatory had only been open since 1932. It sits at 6,288 feet in New Hampshire's White Mountains, one of the stormiest peaks on the planet. The observatory would later adopt the nickname "Home of the World's Worst Weather."

In the early hours of April 12, 1934, chief observer Salvatore Pagliuca was on shift with Alexander McKenzie and Wendell Stephenson. A storm was building outside, and the crew settled in to log it like any other.

Ice Was Winning

Just after 4 a.m., Stephenson woke to a strange rattling sound. Rime ice, the frozen fog that coats everything on the summit during a storm, had built up on the station's anemometer and was throwing off its readings.

With winds already past 150 mph outside the door, Stephenson climbed a ladder into the open air, wooden club in hand, and knocked the ice loose himself.

The storm kept building through the day. By afternoon, gusts were regularly passing 220 mph.

231 Miles an Hour

The observatory's anemometer clicked once for every tenth of a mile of wind that passed it. Pagliuca, a former electrical engineer, timed the gaps between clicks with a stopwatch.

At one point the clicks came just 1.17 seconds apart. He shouted the number twice so photographer Arthur Griffin, staying at the station that night, could write it down: 231 miles an hour.

"Will they believe it?" Pagliuca later said. "Was our first thought."

Nobody Just Took Their Word For It

A number that big invited doubt. Down in Massachusetts, meteorologist Charles Brooks had independently timed the same gust over the radio from Blue Hill Observatory, and his count matched.

The U.S. Weather Bureau took the anemometer off the mountain and tested it in Washington, D.C., alongside the Bureau of Standards and the instrument's manufacturer. No wind tunnel could reproduce a 231 mph gust, so scientists extrapolated from calibration curves and confirmed the reading was accurate to within about 10 mph.

The reading held. In 1996, an automated station on Barrow Island, Australia, recorded a stronger gust during Cyclone Olivia, but no person has ever measured faster wind by hand at a staffed weather station than Pagliuca did that afternoon.

The Chains Are Still There

More than 90 years later, Mount Washington Observatory is still staffed around the clock. Crews rotate onto the summit for week-long shifts, through blizzards and ice storms and the kind of wind that once needed a wooden club to fight off.

Mount Washington Observatory's original building coated in thick white rime ice, anchored to the summit rock with visible metal chains running down its sides — The observatory's original building is still chained directly into the summit rock.

The station's original building is still chained straight into the summit rock, to keep it from blowing away the next time the mountain decides to try for a new record.

Related Tags