James Henry Coffin was born on September 6, 1806, in Williamsburg, Massachusetts.

He was a mathematician and meteorologist who specialized in the study of wind velocity. Coffin graduated from Amherst College in 1828 and taught at various schools and colleges. He began his meteorological studies in 1838. While at Williams College, 1840-1843, he installed an apparatus on Mount Greylock, New York, for automatically recording the direction and the velocity of the wind. From 1846 until his death, Coffin held a chair of mathematics and natural philosophy at Lafayette College. In 1846, he began his collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution in meteorology where he published two studies, “Winds of the Northern Hemisphere” (1853) and “Winds of the Globe” (1875). He was one of the first elected members of the National Academy of Sciences and a prominent member of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Rutgers University in 1859. In 1871, he was elected a corresponding member of the Society for the Promotion of the National Industry of Brazil. He was also appointed U.S. Commissioner to the Vienna Exposition in 1872 to represent the United States in an exhibition of mathematical and astronomical instruments. The British Admiralty adopted Coffin’s records of the winds as a guide to British shipping on all seas. The wooden base of Coffin’s self-registering anemometer is in the Smithsonian Museum’s collection of early scientific equipment.

In 1833, he married Aurelia Medici Jennings (1807-1850). In 1851, he remarried Abby Elizabeth Young. He died on February 6, 1873, in Easton, Pennsylvania.