Herbert L. "Cyclone" Jones
Discoverer of the Tornado Pulse Generator

"The Tornado Pulse Generator was first observed at approximately 10:10pm Central Standard Time on 25 May, 1955, when the thunderstorm that developed into the Blackwell Tornado passed some 15 nautical miles west of Stillwater, Oklahoma, on its way to Blackwell, Oklahoma, and Udall, Kansas, areas of disaster."

- Herbert L. "Cyclone" Jones

Tornadoes fascinated and intrigued Herbert L. Jones, an electrical engineering faculty member at the Oklahoma Agricultural & Mechanical College in Stillwater, but their power and destruction also scared him to death. As a young child living in Canada, while walking with his father one spring day on the Alberta prairie, a rapidly developing thunderstorm created a tornado that passed near the two. The terrifying experience remained etched in his memory for the remainder of his life and led Jones to a lifelong fascination with thunderstorms and to research that became the basis of modern tornado forecasting.

Born on December 2, 1904 in Grants, New Mexico, Jones grew up on a homestead in Alberta, Canada. His family bought a farm near Springfield, Oregon in 1920 and Jones completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon in 1926. After graduation, he worked as an engineer for the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company in Portland, Oregon until 1929 when he took a position with Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. in New York. In 1932, he left Bell and worked as a private consultant in radio, electronics and sound. He earned his master's and doctoral degrees from Oregon State University in 1934 and 1935. He taught electrical engineering at the University of New Mexico before coming to OAMC in the fall of 1946.

During the first tornado season after Jones moved to Oklahoma an extremely destructive tornado killed almost one hundred people as it roared through Woodward, Oklahoma on April 9, 1947. In September of 1947, Jones met with the Director of the Engineering Experiment Station, Charles Dunn, to explore possibilities for the creation of a tornado warning system. This meeting led to the creation of a Tornado Lab Team that identified and predicted tornado development within a thunderstorm using radar and sferics data analysis.