Atmosphere Observation

The fundamental principles on which the most common atmospheric observational instruments are based were discovered during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli invented the first barometer in 1643, while the air hygrometer, a device for measuring atmospheric humidity, was first constructed by the Swiss physicist Horace Bénédict de Saussure in about 1780.

These instruments were useful at first in studying atmospheric properties close to the ground, but not at very high altitudes. In 1648, the French physicist Florin Périer asked his brother-in-law to carry a pair of barometers to the top of Puy-de-Dôme to make measurements of air pressure there, but that was about the limit to which humans themselves could go.