The word ‘cyclone’ was coined in India in 1840, thirty five years before the India Meteorological Department was established, by a man named Henry Piddington, a seafarer who became a judge who then became a meteorologist. Born in 1797, Piddington served first as a British sea captain, and was later appointed as the President of the Marine Courts of Enquiry at Calcutta (now Kolkata). Presumably, Piddington’s job would have required him to investigate cases of shipwreck and damage to ships caught in storms at sea and to settle claims. However, his interest began to wander far beyond the application of maritime law and he started examining the storms themselves.  
In December 1789, a storm had struck disaster on the east coast of India, killing over 20,000 people. Piddington made a thorough investigation of this devastating storm and presented his results before the Asiatic Society of Bengal at Calcutta in 1840. In his paper, he described the storm as a ‘cyclone’, a name he had derived from the Greek word ‘kuklos’ meaning going around, or encircling, like the coil of a snake.
Piddington thereafter continued with his investigations of storms not only in the Indian seas but around ocean basins all over the world. By 1848, he had done such extensive research that he published a book with this long title: “The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms: Being a Practical Exposition of the Theory of the Law of Storms, and Its Uses to Mariners of All Classes in All Parts of the World, Shewn by Transparent Storm Cards and Useful Lessons”.
In the year 1840, when there was no official meteorological agency in India, when so little was known about the atmospheric and oceanic processes, when there were no weather radars and satellites, Piddington could perceive that a cyclone would look like a coil of a snake if seen from the sky above. He explained in his book how he arrived at this new word ‘cyclone’: 
“I am not altogether averse to new names, but I well know how sailors, and indeed many landsmen, dislike them; I suggest, however, that we might perhaps for all this last class of circular or highly curved winds, adopt the term ‘Cyclone’ from the Greek ‘kuklos’ (which signifies amongst other things the coil of a snake) as neither affirming the circle to be a true one, though the circuit may be complete, yet expressing sufficiently the tendency to circular motion in these meteors. We should by the use of it be able to speak without confounding names which may express either straight or circular winds – such as ‘gale, storm, hurricane,’ &c. – with those which are more frequently used to designate merely their strength. This is what leads to confusion, for we say of, and we the authors ourselves write about, ships and places in the same ‘storm’ having ‘the storm commencing’, ‘the gale increasing’, ‘the hurricane passing over’ and the like; merely because the ships or localities of which we speak had the wind of different degrees of strength, though the whole were experiencing parts of the same circular storm. ‘Cycloidal’ is a known word, but it expresses relation to a defined geometrical curve and one not approaching our usual views, which are those of something nearly, though not perfectly, circular. Now if we used a single word and said ‘the cyclone commenced, increased, passed over, &c.’, we shall get rid of all this ambiguity, and use the same word to express the same thing in all cases; and this without any relation.”
We got the first glimpse of a cyclone from outer space in 1960. Since then, we have become very familiar with how a tropical cyclone looks like from space, Television news channels often present animated sequences of the images that clearly show the cloud bands swirling around the centre or the eye of the cyclone, like the coil of a snake. What Piddington could only have imagined, we are actually seeing today.
Today, however, tropical cyclones are called by this original name only in India and the adjoining seas, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, and the Indian Ocean. Over the Atlantic Ocean, they are known as hurricanes, and over the Pacific as typhoons.
Henry Piddington, the captain-turned-judge-turned-meteorologist, was also engaged in scientific research in varied disciplines like botany, geology, mineralogy and soil chemistry. He published numerous papers in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and compiled the ‘English Index to the Plants of India’. He died at Calcutta in 1858.