Atmospheric Layers
Year of Discovery: 1902
What Is It? Earth’s atmosphere has distinct layers of air, each with unique
temperatures, densities, humidities, and other properties.
Who Discovered It? Leon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
What could be more basic to understanding planet Earth than to know what lies between the surface and Earth’s center, or between the surface and outer space? Yet the twentieth century dawned with science having virtually no concept of what the atmosphere was
like more than two miles above the earth’s surface.
Teisserenc de Bort was the first to expand science’s knowledge into the upper reaches
of Earth’s atmosphere. His discovery provided the first accurate image of our atmosphere
and formed the basis for our understanding of meteorological phenomena (storms, winds,
clouds, etc.). Teisserenc de Bort was also the first to take scientific instruments into the
upper atmosphere.
How Was It Discovered?
Born in Paris in 1855, Leon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort was appointed the chief of the
Administrative Center of National Meteorology in Paris at the age of 30. There he was frustrated because he believed that science’s inability to understand and predict weather
stemmed from lack of knowledge about the atmosphere more than three or four kilometers
above the surface.
Certainly, manned balloon flights (both hot air and gas filled) had carried instruments
into the atmosphere. But these flights never ventured above four or five kilometers in altitude. There wasn’t enough oxygen up there for people to breathe.
In 1895 Teisserenc de Bort quit his job to devote full time to developing unmanned,
high-altitude gas balloons at his Versailles villa (outside of Paris). Over the next five years,
Teisserenc de Bort designed an instrument package in a wicker basket that his balloons
would carry aloft. Basic thermometers and barometers were connected to recording devices
so that he would have written records of upper atmospheric conditions once the balloon
returned to Earth.
He also designed