Meteorology

Wilhelm von Bezold was the first professor of meteorology in Germany. For all the tremendous attention paid to the atmosphere in the second half of the 19th century, he argued, all the major questions remained unanswered. What drives storms? What is their energetic, their thermodynamic foundation? How do centers of high and low atmospheric pressure interact? How do clouds form, why are there different kinds of clouds and cloud shapes? Why does it rain and snow and hail? Are there rhythms and cycles longer than the seasonal year? Where do tornadoes and waterspouts come from? The questions went on and on. Meteorology as presented by Bezold was about not weather forecasting, but the strugle to create a physics of the atmosphere.

Relation with Astronomy

Astronomy and meteorology were then parts of the same subject. One had to consider atmospheric conditions in every astronomical observation, and especially carefully in positional astronomy, where one was trying to determine where something was as much as what it was. These atmospheric influences meant that would-be astronomers had to learn how to measure and record temperature and humidity to correct for their effects. Moreover, weather prediction and prognostication was also useful to an astronomer. A falling barometer, high cirrus clouds at noon, and a wind backing from the south to the northwest were strong indications in Heidelberg that an evening planned for astronomical observation might well be spent instead working in the darkroom.

Balloon flight

With few exceptions, meteorology in the previous fifty years had tried to study the three dimensional structure of the atmosphere using only two-dimensional methods of observation. There was, by 1900, a network of meterological stations in the Northern Hemisphere, but the information it gathered was information about what was happening at the surface of Earth -- or at best a few meters above it. It had been possible to expand this network vertically by building meteorological mountain stations, but there is an influence from the topographical and thermal effects of mountains.

Manned balloon flight would allow the investigation of three dimensional structure of the atmosphere up to very great heights in the free air. Bezold was certain that this information would allow the theoretical unification of meteorology as a physics of the ocean of air. Bezold was president of Berlin Aeronautical Society and was an enthusiastic promoter of manned ballooning for scientific purposes. Working together with Richard Aßmann and Arthur Berson, Bezold had requested a grant from the kaiser of 25,000 marks in 1892 to support manned flights from Berlin. The young kaiser, enthused by the project, gave him 50,000 marks instead. Most of these flights were eventually made by Berson between 1892 and 1898 using Aßmann's instruments

Researchers

Around 1900, there were only two real university professorships of meteorology in Germany and Austria. There was Wilhelm von Bezold at Berlin, holding the first and only professorial chair of meteorology in the whole German Empire -- this, in part, as a courtesy appointment befitting his status as head of the Prussian Meterological Institute. There was also the chair in meteorology and geophysics created for Julius Hann at Graz in Austria.

Meanwhile, the other meteorologists in German-speaking academia worked in nonacademic positions in state-supported institutes. Wladimir Koppen at the German Marine Observatory in Hamburg, Hugo Hergesell at Straßburg, Richard Aßmann at the Lindenberg Observatory. Under the direction of these institute leaders were a large number of workers variously styled "collaborators", "assistants", and "helpers". These were modest employements, but often filled by scientists of international distinction, such as the balloonist Arthur Berson, Aßmann's collaborators for twenty years at Berlin and then Lindenberg. The list also includes the Austrian Max Margules who got a staff position as an assistant at the Vienna Zentralanstalt fur Meteorologie.

In England, Russia and Scandinavia, the situation was much the same. For example. Nils Ekholm, a collaborator of Svante Arrhenius and polar traveler, worked as an assistant at Uppsala and Stockholm, until he finally obtained the professorship that went along with the directorship of the Meterological Institute in Stockholm.

Still farther from the ranks of university and government posts, there were independent scientists like French pioneer of upper atmospheric research, Leon Teisserenc de Bort and his American counterpart and friend, A. Lawrence Rotch. They combined personal means and private sponsors (including, in de Bort's case, Prince Albert of Monaco) to erect independent institutes where they pursued their own programs of research.