A Brief Historical Outline
on the discovery of
Atmospheric Structure
1593 Galileo invents thermometer
1643 Evangelista Torricelli invents barometer
1648 Florin Périer (with Blaise Pascal's instruction) demonstrates pressure decreases with altitude
1714 Gabriel Fahrenheit introduces temperature scale
1749 Alexander Wilson uses thermometers on a kite
1804 manned balloon exploration by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
1840's Laws of thermodynamics take shape
1850's James Espy empirically estimates dry and saturated lapse rates
1862 William Thomson theoretically derives these lapse rates
1866 James Maxwell develops kinetic theory of gases (suggested by Daniel Bernoulli in 1738)
1868 G. J. Storey proposes idea of an exosphere
1882 Balfour Stewart suggests electrical currents exist in upper atmosphere
1894 self-recording thermometer developed
1898 Léon-Philippe Teisserence de Bort begins use of instrumented balloons
1901 Teisserence de Bort discovers isothermal layer about 8 miles up
1901 Guglielmo Marconi receives trans-Atlantic radio signal
1902 Oliver Heaviside and Arthur Kennelly separately predict existence of ionosphere
1908 Teisserence de Bort coins words "troposphere" & "stratosphere"
1915 "zones of silence" imply temperature inversion exists above troposphere
1920 Gordon Dobson infers temperature inversion from observed altitude of meteors
1924 Edward Appleton develops ionosonde; confirms existence of ionosphere
1925 Robert Watson-Watt coins word "ionosphere"
1929 Robert Godddard conducts first rocket probe of atmosphere
1930 Sydney Chapman and Vincent Ferraro propose existence of magnetosphere
1948 Rocket probes of upper atmosphere begun
1957 Sputnik I launched, first satellite to orbit the Earth
1958 Explorer 1 discovers Van Allen "radiation" belts
1959 Thomas Gold coins word "magnetosphere"
1959 W. G. Stroud et al. discover very cold summer mesopause
1961 Explorer 12 detects magnetopause
1963 Donald Carpenter discovers plasmapause