was located. The vessels were involved in search and rescue operations involving aircraft and other ships. The vessels themselves had search radar and could activate a homing beacon to guide lost aircraft towards the ships' known locations. Each ship's homing beacon used a distinctly different frequency. In addition, the ships provided a platform where scientific and oceanographic research could be conducted. The role of aircraft support gradually changed after 1975, as jet aircraft began using polar routes. By 1982, the ocean weather vessel role had changed too, and the ships were used to support short range weather forecasting, in numerical weather prediction computer programs which forecast weather conditions several days ahead, for climatological studies, marine forecasting, and oceanography, as well as monitoring pollution out at sea. At the same time, the transmission of the weather data using Morse code was replaced by a system using telex-over-radio. Origin In the 1860s, Britain began connecting coastal lightships with submarine telegraph cables so they could be used as weather stations. There were attempts to place weather ships using submarine cables far out into the Atlantic. The first of these was in 1870 with the old Corvette The Brick 50 miles off Lands End. £15,000 was spent on the project, but ultimately it failed. In 1881, there was a proposal for a weather ship in the mid-Atlantic, but it came to nothing. Deep-ocean weather ships had to await the commencement of radio telegraphy. The director of France's meteorological service, Météo-France, proposed the idea of a stationary weather ship in 1921 in order to aid shipping and the coming of transatlantic flights. Another early proposal for weather ships occurred in connection with aviation in August 1927, when the aircraft designer Grover Loening stated that "weather stations along the ocean coupled with the development of the seaplane to have an equally long range, would result in regular ocean flights within ten years." During 1936 and 1937, the British Meteorological Office (Met Office) installed a meteorologist aboard a North Atlantic cargo steamer to take special surface weather observations and release pilot balloons to measure the winds aloft at the synoptic hours of 0000, 0600, 1200, and 1800 UTC. In 1938 and 1939, France established a merchant ship as the first stationary weather ship, which took surface observations and launched radiosondes to measure weather conditions aloft. Starting in 1939, United States Coast Guard vessels were being used as