Christophe Hendrik Diederik Buys Ballot

Buys Ballot was the founding director of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the man who turned weather observation in Europe from folklore into a network science. His name is attached to a law of wind directions that any sailor still knows.

In 1845 he set up what remains one of the most entertaining experiments in physics. He hired an open railway flatcar on the Utrecht–Maarssen line, stationed a group of trumpet players on it, and had them hold a single pure tone as the train sped past a platform of listeners with perfect pitch. The sharpness on approach, the flatness on departure, matched Doppler's paper to the half-tone. Repeated a dozen times over three days, it settled the question.

He spent the rest of his career building the international telegraphic weather network that made modern forecasting possible.