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Albert J. Myer was born on September 20, 1828, in Newburgh, New York, the son of Henry Beekman Myer and Eleanor Pope McLannan. While he was still a child his mother died, and he was brought up by an aunt, with whom, about 1836, he moved to Buffalo.
Myer graduated from Hobart College (Bachelor of Arts degree) in 1847 and from Buffalo Medical College (Doctor of Medicine degree) in 1851.
On September 18, 1854, Myer entered the army as an assistant surgeon. From the close of his college days he had known how to operate a telegraph instrument, and while serving on the Texas plains where the clearness of the air made it possible to see objects at a great distance, he became enthusiastic over the possibilities of visual signaling.
In 1856 he drafted a memorandum on his signal devices, and in 1858 succeeded in having a military board authorized to consider them. Two more years of effort on his part resulted in an act of Congress adding to the staff of the army one signal officer with the rank and pay of major, and on June 27, 1860, Myer was appointed to the post. He had as yet, however, no organization to carry on his work, and almost immediately was ordered to the West, where until March 1861 he took part in General Canby's expedition against the Navajos in New Mexico. He carried his enthusiasm with him, and his visual signaling, with a code of three elements, was successfully used in that campaign.
On the outbreak of the Civil War he called attention to the need for a signal service, and in June 1861 was ordered to Washington to organize and command the Signal Corps of the army. He also furnished plans for naval signaling at the request of the secretary of the navy. Although still handicapped by lack of personnel, he succeeded in having signal schools organized, and himself conducted signal communications in the Army of the Potomac. He was on the staffs of Generals Butler, McDowell, and McClellan, serving from the first battle of Bull Run through much of the fighting in Northern Virginia.
He was brevetted lieutenant-colonel, May 27, 1862, for gallant services in the battle of Hanover Court House, and colonel, July 2, 1862, for similar services at Malvern Hill. In the meantime he was busy in Washington extending the scope of his activities. He succeeded finally in securing the establishment of the Signal Corps through the enactment of the Sundry Civil Act, March 3, 1863. This gave him the position of colonel and chief signal officer. He held the appointment as colonel until it expired and was revoked July 21, 1864.
The expansion of his activities - he supervised the building of some five thousand miles of telegraph lines to frontier posts - kept him in conflict with the United States Military Telegraph, which was under the direct supervision of an assistant secretary of war, and at length, owing to the friction between the two services, he was relieved as chief signal officer (November 1863) and ordered to a reconnaissance of the Mississippi River.
From May 1864 to the end of the war he was signal officer of the Division of West Mississippi, and participated in operations along the river.
On May 13, 1865, he was brevetted brigadier-general for his services as chief signal officer and for special service October 5, 1864, when the post of Allatoona was saved by relief secured through signal communication. On July 28, 1866, an act of Congress reorganized the Signal Corps and gave Myer the permanent rank of colonel as chief signal officer.
He assumed charge August 21, 1867. For some years prior to the Civil War the Smithsonian Institution had issued weather predictions and storm warnings based on telegraphic weather reports; but this work was interrupted by the war, and its resumption afterward delayed by a fire at the Smithsonian. In his report of 1869 Myer proposed that the peacetime activities of the Signal Corps be extended to include the sending out of storm warnings. His arguments, in conjunction with those of certain others interested in the matter, led Congress, in February 1870, to authorize the establishment of the United States Weather Bureau under the direction of the Signal Corps.
During the first ten years of its existence Myer supervised the new bureau, which was soon rendering an extremely valuable service to commerce. He represented the United States at meteorological congresses in Vienna (1873) and Rome (1879), and by his perseverance and tact succeeded in bringing about the establishment of a uniform international system of simultaneous meteorological observations.
On June 16, 1880, he was promoted brigadier-general in conformity with legislation giving the chief signal officer that rank. He died on August 24, 1880, at Buffalo, New York, two months later, while still in active service.
Albert James Myer was a prominent surgeon and military, who was known as the father of the U. S. Army Signal Corps, as its first chief signal officer just prior to the American Civil War, the inventor of wig-wag signaling (or aerial telegraphy), and also as the father of the U. S. Weather Bureau. Fort Myer, Virginia, is named for him.
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On August 24, 1857, Albert J. Myer married Catherine Walden, daughter of a prominent Buffalo attorney, with whom he would have six children.
