From: benlizro@ihug.co.nz   
      
   (Well, wiki says 1861.) And all thanks to Robert Fitzroy -- yes, the one   
   who took Charles Darwin along as a travelling companion on the Beagle,   
   and was Governor of New Zealand for a couple of years. By this time he   
   was a Rear Admiral and a member of the Royal Society. in 1854 he was   
   appointed "Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade". He used the   
   telegraph to collect weather reports from all over the country, and   
   started producing what seem at first to have been just "reports" of what   
   the weather had been the previous day in various places. It's not clear   
   from either Crystal or Wiki exactly when the predictive element came in.   
   When it did, the term "weather-cast" was sometimes used, but eventually   
   Fitzroy's preference, "forecast", became standard.   
      
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_FitzRoy   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)