The invention of atmosphere
Introduction
Today the earth's atmosphere along with the other planets' atmospheres form the subject matter of an independent field of science that uses expensive, sophisticated tools and advanced mathematics. The atmospheric sciences have their own departments, journals, and government funding (Conway, 2008, Harper, 2008, Yeang, 2013). The changing conditions of the atmosphere can cause public anxiety, provoke state action, and engender global debate. The atmosphere itself might seem like a given, a universally recognized phenomenon that transcends eras and cultures. Yet, like many seemingly universal ideas tied to the history of science – for example, the concepts of observation, fact, or gas – the word “atmosphere” emerged at a particular historical moment (Daston, 1991, Pagel, 1982, Park, 2011). Strictly speaking, before 1600 no one used the word or conceived of the atmosphere or atmospheres as objects of philosophical or mathematical analysis.
Two Greek words “ἀτμóς,” meaning vapor, and “σφαῖρα,” meaning sphere, form the word “atmosphere,” or “atmosphaera” in Latin, giving it the flavor of a classical term. It is not. The word initially appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century, first in Latin and then quickly afterward in other European languages. The neologism first emerged from those swayed by linguistic patriotism and humanists' concerns with the history and origins of language. Transformed into Latin, the word atmosphaera spread rapidly through Europe's networks of learned culture. By the middle of the seventeenth century, vernacular writings of virtuosi established cognates in English, French, and Italian.
That the diffusion of the word and the acceptance of the atmosphere as a concept of natural philosophy corresponded to alterations of and adjustments to traditional Aristotelian natural philosophies is not obvious. No polemicists railed against innovators who investigated the atmosphere. No church banned or jailed scholars because they asserted its existence. Some thinkers, emblematic of the new sciences, such as Galileo Galilei and René Descartes, seem not to have used the term. Yet, by the end of the seventeenth century, “the atmosphere,” or rather simply “atmosphere,” was a term used in multiple fields of research, not just cosmology and meteorology but botany and medicine as well. And despite the lack of polemics surrounding the atmosphere, its employment signified an understanding of the world that differed from that of the traditional natural philosophies and middle sciences of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Section snippets
The aerial region in Aristotelian meteorology and the optical tradition
The seventeenth-century conceptual and linguistic origins of the atmosphere has been obscured by the widespread conflation of ancient and medieval conceptions of the region between the earth and moon with the atmosphere.1
Atmosphere: language and mathematics
The Netherlands at the turn of the seventeenth century fostered humanist erudition, artisanal practices, and mathematical learning (Vermij, 1996). In that setting, where the desire to recover ancient mathematics mixed with philological and historical concerns, the term atmosphere arose. Simon Stevin, the Brugeois mathematician and engineer, served as tutor and technical consultant to Maurice of Nassau, who became the Prince of Orange. Stevin wrote treatises on a range of mathematical subjects,
Christoph Scheiner, refraction, and atoms
The first to adopt the word “atmosphere” outside of the Netherlands, as one might expect of readers of Snellius's translation of Stevin, endorsed mathematical investigations into nature. Jesuits, with their rigorous mathematical training and interest in mixed mathematics, were at the forefront of these fields (Baldini, 2003, Dear, 1995, pp. 32-62; Romano, 2006). This interest in mathematics had quickly brought Stevin's works to the attention of leading Jesuit astronomers, including Christoph
The atmosphere expands
Mathematically inclined Jesuit scholars adopted the term and Scheiner's physical distinctions. Giuseppe Biancani, a Jesuit mathematician based in Parma, championed mathematical investigations into nature (Dear, 1995, p. 40; De Ceglia, 2003). He knew and corresponded with Scheiner, yet professed fondness for and friendship with Galileo in a letter written to Grienberger. The censor of his 1615 Aristotelis loca mathematica interpreted Biancani's strained interpretations that professed to
Gassendi's atmosphere
Many of the first writers that used the term atmosphere – Snellius, Scheiner, Wilkins – engaged in polemics against Aristotle and Aristotelians. Similarly, many of those who further diffused the term during the middle and second half of the seventeenth century were among the most fervent anti-Aristotelians. Most prominent was Pierre Gassendi. In the 1620s he wrote sophisticated analyses of Aristotelian philosophy that attempted to show the unreliability of the extant texts of Aristotle, the
Air and atmosphere: the pneumatic tradition in England
In England, Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, and others associated with the Royal Society employed the term atmosphere, as the word became further entwined with experimental philosophy and corpuscular matter theory. Experimental investigations into the nature of air, which historians for long have seen as key to transformations of early modern natural philosophy, changed conceptions of the atmosphere, as well as offering novel techniques for measuring its extent.20
Fusing the traditions
In the last decades of the seventeenth century, scholars combined the crepuscular and barometric traditions as they sought more precise answers to questions about the limits of the atmosphere and its composition. Terrestrial exhalations and effluvia figured prominently in these explorations. For example, Isaac Newton accepted that terrestrial exhalations or products of earthly fermentations fill the atmosphere. In a 1679 letter to Boyle, he explained his views on the constitution of the
Conclusion
Snellius and Stevin might have thought little of their Aristotelian predecessors and contemporaries but, for them, the concept of an atmosphere per se was not a rejection of traditional natural philosophy. The term was a translation, four times removed, of Ptolemy's wet exhalation that surrounds the earth, an idea some natural philosophers found compatible with Aristotelian meteorology. Throughout the seventeenth century, thinkers, such as Boyle, Hooke, Gassendi, Halley, and Newton, held that
Acknowledgments
A fellowship from the NEH and the Folger Shakespeare Library funded research for this article. I thank Tawrin Baker and Christoph Lüthy for their suggestions and comments.
References (152)
Refraction, twilight, and the height of the atmosphere
Vistas in Astronomy
(1976)Historia natural y moral de las Indias
(1894)Meteorology today: An introduction to weather, climate, and the environment
(2009)Meteora
Science during the Portuguese maritime discoveries: The case of interaction between experimenters and theoreticians
The Instauratio magna: Part III: Historia naturalis et experimentalis
Riccioli e Grimaldi
The Academy of Mathematics of the Collegio Romano from 1553 to 1612
Jean Pena (1528–58) and Stoic physics in the sixteenth century
The Southern Journal of Philosophy
(1985)Stoic contributions to early modern science
Brahe and Rothmann on atmospheric refraction
Lieu et espace dans la philosophie de Gassendi
Sphaera mundi seu cosmographia demonstrativa
Glossographia
Glossographia
A discourse concerning the origine and properties of wind
Experiment and natural philosophy in seventeenth-century Tuscany
The evolution of the term ‘Mixed Mathematics’
Journal for the History of Ideas
Commentaria in quatuor libros meteorologicorum Aristotelis
Les elemens de l’astronomie
Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana
Elements, principles and corpuscles: A study of atomism and chemistry in the seventeenth century
Gassendi, Charleton and Boyle on matter and motion
Watching Vesuvius: A history of science and culture in early modern Italy
In libros meteororum
Atmospheric science at NASA
Sir Mattew Hale 1609–1676: Law, religion and natural philosophy
Baconian facts, academic civility, and the prehistory of objectivity
Annals of Scholarship
The physicist and astronomer Christopher Scheiner: Biography, letter, works
‘Additio illa non videtur edenda’: Giuseppe Biancani, reader of Galileo in an unedited Censored text
Le matematiche e il mondo
L’expérience barométrique: ses antécédents et ses explications; étude historique
Willebrord Snellius (1580–1626): A humanist reshaping the mathematical sciences
Discipline and experience: The mathematical way in the scientific revolution
Wine and water: Honoré Fabri on mixures
A discourse concerning the vegetation of plants
Simon Stevin
Mechanization of the world picture
Simon Stevin: Science in the Netherlands around 1600
Galileo Galilei e la cultura della tradizione
Reflexions sur la cause generale des vents
Jesuit: Savants
The use and abuse of mathematical entities: Galileo and the Jesuits revisited
Pierre Gassendi's philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists
Meteorologicorum libri sex
Cited by (6)
Inhabiting the Atmosphere: The Architecture of the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium
2023, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians'Meteorology' and 'meteors' across centuries: A short history of two problematic terms
2023, Classical Receptions JournalConceptions of the atmosphere and the nature of the air in the 18th century: Descartes' heritage
2021, Revue d'Histoire des SciencesWeather geographies: Talking about the weather, considering diverse sovereignties
2021, Progress in Human GeographyWordsworth and the poetics of air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a time of climate change
2018, Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air: Atmospheric Romanticism in a Time of Climate Change