Unfortunately, at the peak of Finley’s career, forecasting got political and a hot debate raged about whether the weather service should be under military or civilian control. Ultimately his superiors terminated his tornado studies in the late 1800s and ordered him to halt all predictions, discouraging use of the word “tornado” on the grounds that it would incite public panic—a harm they judged greater than injuries and damage inflicted by the storm itself. The word remained verboten for decades, and tornado research and forecasting fell into a dark ages of sorts until the late 1940s.
