Mills
Fairwether was born in 1871 in Camden, New Jersey. His interest in
climatology was inspired by his father’s stories about how the artillery
barrages during Civil War battles would invariably be followed by heavy
rainstorms. He received his B.S. degree from Cornell in 1893 and
his M.S. degree in 1895 from Penn. He spent the next three years
travelling through British East Africa and the Belgian Congo, gathering
data about the interaction between geography, botany, and weather.
His African trek ended abruptly when he expelled from Leopoldville for
making derogatory comments about the Belgian king. Returning to the
U.S., he competed his doctoral studies at Yale, receiving his Ph.D. in
1900. After an extended vacation in Austria and Switzerland, he joined
the faculty at NYU in 1901, receiving tenure in 1905. He has written
several books about climatology, his latest being “Rain and Its Impact
on Popular Culture".
