Daniel Draper (2 April 1841 – 21 December 1931) was an American meteorologist and inventor who served for more than forty-two years as the official meteorologist for the city of New York and who attained worldwide distinction in the fields of science relating to astronomy and the weather.
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Early life
He was born in Manhattan in 1841, one of six children of the English scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian, and pioneer photographer John William Draper and Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira née Gardner. Daniel Draper began his schooling at the NYU primary department, but was mainly homeschooled by his aunt Dorothy Catherine Draper and studied science with his father. Later as his father's assistant in chemistry and physiology, he prepared the amanuensis for his father's Intellectual Development of Europe and other works. Draper attended New York University, of which his father was a founder, and took his Ph.D. there in 1880. He was unable to serve during the American Civil War because he was partially deaf from having scarlet fever as a child.
Career
Draper established the New York Meteorological Observatory in Central Park in 1868 and was its first and only Director until 1911. Draper also invented a number of important weather measurement devices including a self-recording wind direction and velocity instruments, self-recording dry and wet bulb thermometers, a hygrograph, a self-recording rain gauge, a sun thermometer, and a weighing mercurial barograph, thus beginning the 150-plus-year Central Park climatological record that continues to this day. He helped his brother Henry Draper to construct the telescopes, grind the mirrors and build his observatory at Hastings-on-Hudson. He was for many years an official of the New York Health Department.