Colonizing the Free Atmosphere: Wladimir Köppen’s ‘Aerology’, the German Maritime Observatory, and the Emergence of a Trans-Imperial Network of Weather Balloons and Kites, 1873-1906

Abstract

This article suggests that the meteorological science of ‘aerology’, the global study of the upper air with the help of balloons and kites, emerged most prominently in Imperial Germany in the first decade of the twentieth century as a consequence of trans-imperial networks and field work.