The invention of atmosphere

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Highlights

  • Snellius coined the term “atmosphere,” translating Stevin's Dutch neologism.

  • The Jesuit mathematician Scheiner conceived of the atmosphere as being composed of atoms.

  • Torricellian experiments offered a new understanding of the atmosphere.

  • Gassendi argued that the atmosphere contradicted Aristotelian meteorological principles.

  • Charleton, Boyle, Halley, and Hooke reformulated the size and composition of the atmosphere.

Abstract

The word “atmosphere” was a neologism Willebrord Snellius created for his Latin translation of Simon Stevin's cosmographical writings. Astronomers and mathematical practitioners, such as Snellius and Christoph Scheiner, applying the techniques of Ibn Mu‘ādh and Witelo, were the first to use the term in their calculations of the height of vapors that cause twilight. Their understandings of the atmosphere diverged from Aristotelian divisions of the aerial region. From the early years of the seventeenth century, the term was often associated with atomism or corpuscular matter theory. The concept of the atmosphere changed dramatically with the advent of pneumatic experiments in the middle of the seventeenth century. Pierre Gassendi, Walter Charleton, and Robert Boyle transformed the atmosphere of the mathematicians giving it the characteristics of weight, specific gravity, and fluidity, while disputes about its extent and border remained unresolved.

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.

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