One hundred and forty-eight years ago tomorrow, Britain's first weather charts were sold daily at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. These 1851 productions did not forecast but merely, well, charted the weather.

They were a long way from a picture of a storm over the Atlantic used as a visual aid by Michael Fish; but they were a heap more useful for planning a holiday excursion than their predecessor, the world's first weather chart, which had been drawn in 1821 by one Heinrich Brandes. This told you all you needed to know about meteorological conditions, so long as it was those experienced in Saxony on December 24.

In 1875, the Times began publishing regular weather charts - on April 1, the day happily selected in 1960 for the launch of the US's first weather satellite.

Oddly enough, April Fool's Day was not the date chosen for what purported to be the first actual weather forecast. It was halfway through May 1692 that the weekly paper entitled A Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade published a table for the forthcoming seven days, complete with air pressure and wind readings.

This was less useful in making a last-minute holiday booking than it might seem, since the readings were taken from observations made on the relevant days in the previous year. The idea was that the 12-month-old figures allowed readers to produce their own DIY weather forecast or, as the paper put it, ''Twould be of great use to have a true history of the weather, from which it is likeliest to draw prognostications.'

Prognostications galore followed in, among other publications, a 1711 magazine called Monthly Weather Paper. Astrological mumbo-jumbo featured as a resource rather more than did meteorological expertise and these forecasts were accurate in the same way that a stopped clock is spot-on twice a day.

The first broadcast weather bulletins came from Wisconsin University's radio station in 1917. They were in Morse, which meant that fewer people could understand them - and be misled by them.