George James Symons

George James Symons
George James Symons
Born	6 August 1838 London
Died	10 March 1900 (1900-03-11) (aged 61) London
Nationality	United Kingdom
Fields	Meteorology
Notable awards	Albert Medal (1897)

George James Symons FRS (6 August 1838 – 10 March 1900) was a British meteorologist who founded and managed the British Rainfall Organisation, an unusually dense and widely distributed network of rainfall data collection sites throughout the British Isles.

He was the only child of Joseph Symons by his wife, Georgina Moon. He was born at Queen's Row, Pimlico, on 6 August 1838. His education, begun at St. Peter's collegiate school, Eaton Square, was completed under private tuition at Thornton rectory, Leicestershire. He subsequently passed with distinction through the course at the school of mines, Jermyn Street.

From boyhood, he made observations on the weather with instruments of his own construction, and at the age of seventeen became a member of the Royal Meteorological Society. From 1863, he sat on the council, acted as secretary 1873-9 and 1882-99, and was elected president in 1880 and again in 1900. In 1857, he undertook, and continued to discharge until his death, the duties of meteorological reporter to the registrar-general, and was appointed by Robert FitzRoy in 1860 to a post in the meteorological department of the board of trade, which he held for three years. He resigned it owing to the growing exigencies of his rainfall observations. The first of a series of thirty-nine annual volumes containing statistics on the subject was published by him in 1860 ; it included records from 168 stations in England and Wales. In 1898, the number of stations had grown to 3,404, of which 436 were in Scotland and 186 in Ireland, and they were manned by an army of over three thousand volunteer observers. This unique organisation was kept by Symons under close personal supervision, and the upshot was the accumulation of a mass of data of standard value, unmatched in any other country. The sanitary importance of water-supply was a determining motive for its collection.

Symons began, in 1863, the issue of a monthly rain-circular, which developed in 1866 into the Monthly Meteorological Magazine, still in course of publication. He was a prominent member of various committees appointed by the British Association, and as secretary to the conference on lightning rods in 1878 shared largely in the four years' task of compiling its report. Elected in 1878 a fellow of the Royal Society, he acted as chairman of the committee on the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, and edited the voluminous report published in 1888. He sat on the council of the Social Science Association in 1878, and on the jury of the Health Exhibition in 1884; was registrar to the Sanitary Institute from 1880 to 1895, and drew up a report on the 1884 Colchester earthquake for the Mansion House committee. In 1876, he received the Telford premium of the Institution of Civil Engineers for a paper on Floods and Water Economy, and in 1897 the Albert medal of the Society of Arts for the 'services rendered to the United Kingdom' by his rainfall observations.