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Apr 10, 1486
Leonardo Da Vinci
He invented the balance hygrometer some time between 1480-1486 a hygrometer is a device used to measure atmospheric humidity. He also designed a deflection plate anemometer and an anemoscope, a type of wind vane. -
Apr 10, 1493
Paracelsus
Paracelsus was a Swiss physician who studied the relationships between climate and weather and medicine. He wrote that anyone who studied winds, lightning and weather would understand what caused illness. -
Apr 10, 1503
Nostradamus
Nostradamus was a French seer and visionary. He made many predictions of future events.He was critical of a preoccupation with the weather, and liked to make weather forecasts. -
Apr 10, 1540
Jose De Acosta
He was a Spanish Jesuit missionary and naturalist who served in South America. He studied earthquakes, volcanoes, tides, currents, magnetic declinations and meteorological phenomena. In his work Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, published in 1590, he provided an explanation of the prevailing winds in the subtropical and middle latitudes. He attributed the regular easterly winds of the subtropics (the trade winds) to the movement of the heavens about a stationary Earth -
Apr 10, 1546
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer and astrologer who believed that the weather could be predicted through astronomical and astrological techniques. -
Apr 10, 1561
Francis Bacon
was an English natural philosopher who believed that in the scientific arena one should touch and feel and measure things for oneself. As such, he was one of the earliest exponents of the scientific method, and so helped usher in a new era for science. Bacon had an insatiable curiosity about all natural phenomena. -
Apr 10, 1564
Galilei Galileo
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer, mathematician, physicist and philosopher who was one of the pioneers of the modern scientific method. He believed that the laws of nature could be expressed in mathematics. -
Apr 10, 1571
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer and mathematician.Kepler believed that the weather patterns on the Earth were related to the geometrical relationships between the Earth and the planets. -
J.A. Komensky
J. A. Komensky, also known as Comenius, was a Czechoslovakian philosopher, writer and educator. His work Opera Didactica Omnia included a discussion of weather-related topics. -
Rene Descartes
René Descartes was a French philosopher and mathematician. In around 1631 he described an experiment to determine the atmospheric pressure, but did not build an apparatus to carry out the experiment. He was a major contibutor to the invention of the barometer. -
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was a French scientist, mathematician and philosopher. One of his early interests was the study of fluids. This led him to design an experiment using a barometer like the one invented by Torricelli in 1644. because of his great contributions, his name is now used in the field of measurements and is used to measure liquids. -
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle was an Irish-born inventor and scientist who spent much of his life in England. He may have brought a Torricelli type of mercury barometer back to England after his studies in the Continent, and was one of the first to see the potential of the instrument for studying properities of the air. He built his own mercury barometers, and appears to have been the first to use the term 'barometer'. -
John Locke
John Locke was an English physician and philosopher. He was a friend of Robert Boyle, who urged him to keep a weather diary or weather journal following a trend that originated in the Royal Society in the 1660s. Robert Hooke also encouraged this type of activity and published a comprehensive set of instructions for making weather observations in his paper 'A Method for Making a History of the Weather'. It was presented to the Royal Society in around 1663. Locke started his own weather journal in -
Christopher Wren
Christopher Wren was an English mathematician, astronomer and architect who had a wide variety of scientific interests, including meteorology. While studying at Oxford in around 1650, he produced preliminary designs for a rain gauge and an automatic weather observing station. -
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke was an English experimental scientist and instrument maker. He worked in a wide variety of areas, including meteorology. Early in his career, Hooke collaborated with Robert Boyle in studies of the properties of gases and in experiments with barometers. Hooke was the first to observe sunspots through the use of the helioscope he designed for studying the sun. -
Olaus Roemer
Olaus Roemer was a Danish astronomer. In the early 1690s, he began to measure and record the air temperature to account for its effects on his astronomical work, and starting in 1702 he constructed his own spirit (alcohol) thermometers. -
Christian Huygens
Christian Huygens was a Dutch astronomer. His scientific bent led him to the conclusion that temperature measurements with thermometers would be useful only if they were made using a defined scale. Huygens proposed in 1665 a thermometer scale in which there would be two fixed points: the freezing and boiling points of water. The modern Celsius temperature scale can be traced back to this proposal. However, for many years after Huygens' time there was no agreement on a common scale. -
William Herschel
William Herschel was an English astronomer and the discoverer of the planet Uranus. He also had some interest in climate. In the late 1700s he hypothesized about physical processes that might affect the climate, such as cooling due to volcanic or meteoric dust veils in the atmosphere, or warming due to increased solar activity. -
Johann Dobereiner
Johann Döbereiner was a German chemist. He proposed the principles of operation of the dewpoint hygrometer or condensation hygrometer in or around 1822. -
William Spiers Bruce
William Bruce was a Scottish naturalist who with the support of Scottish meteorologist R.T. Omond obtained a post as meteorologist at the Ben Nevis Observatory, where he worked on meteorological research in 1895 and 1896.
