Matthew Fontaine Maury: Biografie, Errungenschaften und bleibendes Vermächtnis

In 1825, at 19, Maury obtained, through U.S. Representative Sam Houston, a midshipman's warrant in the United States Navy. As a midshipman on board the frigate USS Brandywine, he almost immediately began to study the seas and record methods of navigation. When a leg injury left him unfit for sea duty, Maury devoted his time to studying navigation, meteorology, winds, and currents.

He became Superintendent of the Depot of Charts and Instruments, later renamed the United States Naval Observatory, in 1844. There, Maury studied thousands of ships' logs and charts. He published the Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic, which showed sailors how to utilize the ocean's currents and winds to their advantage, thereby drastically reducing the length of ocean voyages. Maury's uniform system of recording oceanographic data was adopted by navies and merchant marines worldwide and was used to develop charts for all the major trade routes.

With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Maury, a Virginian, resigned his commission as a U.S. Navy commander and joined the Confederacy. He spent the war in the Southern United States, and Great Britain and France as a Confederate envoy. He helped the Confederacy acquire a ship, CSS Georgia, while trying to convince several European powers to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy. Following the war, Maury was eventually pardoned; he accepted a teaching position at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia.

He died at the institute in 1873 after completing an exhausting state-to-state lecture tour on national and international weather forecasting. He had also completed his book, Geological Survey of Virginia, and a new series on geography for young people.