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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 
 

 
Robert-Jan Wille 
r.b.wille@uu.nl 

Utrecht University 

 

 

 

 

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.  

Although contemporaries and historians have often demoted aerology to the level of a 
Hilfswissenschaft to the emerging discipline of atmospheric physics, aerology was a top-down 
program of investing in scientific infrastructure to jumpstart, on the global stage, what 
contemporaries such as the Russian-German meteorologist Wladimir Köppen felt as long 
overdue: a German synoptic meteorology.1 Newly established German weather balloon halls and 
kite stations became rivals in the field to metropolitan observatories and universities, 
assimilating data produced by expeditions and field work in general.2 It was thanks to German 
aerologists, German meteorological stations and the German coordination of simultaneous 
European weather balloon ascents in the first decades of the twentieth century, that in the 1920s 
and 1930s both the Norwegian Bergen School and Lewis Fry Richardson were able to attempt 

                                                             
1 Wladimir Köppen, “Die Wechselwirkung zwischen der maritimen und der Landmeteorologie in deren 
Entwickelung,” Meteorologische Zeitschrift 26 (1909). 
2 On the role of stations and field laboratories in the life sciences, see: Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and 
Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Jeremy 
Vetter, “Rocky Mountain High Science. Teaching, Research and Nature at Field Stations,” in Knowing Global 
Environments. New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences (Piscataway NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 
108–134; Robert-Jan Wille, “The Co-Production of Station Morphology and Agricultural Management in the 
Tropics. Transformations in Botany at the Botanical Garden at Buitenzorg, Java 1880-1904,” ed. Denise Phillips and 
Sharon Kingsland, New perspectives on the history of life sciences and agriculture., Archimedes series in the history 
and philosophy of science (2015): 256–281; Raf De Bont, Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal 
Research, 1870-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For a meteorological case, see: Deborah R. 
Coen, “The Storm Lab: Meteorology in the Austrian Alps,” Science in Context 22, no. 3 (2009): 463–486. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 
 
 

 
 

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modelling weather.3 Robert Friedman and Mott Greene have demonstrated the importance of 
aerology for later careers in meteorology and geophysics, not only contributing to the career of 
Vilhelm Bjerknes, but also to that of Alfred Wegener.4  

For most historians, the crucial phase in the development of transnational atmospheric 
physics is the Cold War, when weather models and satellites emerged as tools. Paul Edwards has 
demonstrated how only between 1965 and 1975 did an interdisciplinary community succeed in 
tying together different research strands to create a transnational scientific and political 
community – or ‘vast machine’ – of climate sciences. In this machine the field of atmospheric 
physics had lead the way, with oceanography and ecology adopting its computer models and 
satellite data as shared ‘boundary objects’.5  

However, although Edwards did focus on the importance of infrastructural globalism 
before the Cold War,6 he left it to other historians to analyze the emergence of atmospheric 
physics itself as a distinct field half a century before. Around the First World War, it entered the 
university curriculum in Germany.7 There, a decade earlier, state observatories had started 
organizing regular balloon and kite ascents. This practice was exported to the Scandinavian 
countries when Bjerknes returned from Leipzig to Bergen before the War and created the Bergen 
School of atmospheric physics that became the dominant theory of meteorology after the 1930s, 
in the United States and the rest of the world.8  

This article suggests that Germany’s campaign in weather kites and balloons between 
1900 and 1914 needs to be seen as a crucial (and heretofore missing) link or intermediary 
between two distinct periods and geographies in the history of meteorology. Whereas in the 
history of nineteenth century weather science the focus has mostly been on maritime 
meteorology, physical laws and weather prediction in Great Britain, its naval neighbors and to a 

                                                             
3 Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather. Vilhelm Bjerkness and the Construction of a Modern 
Meteorology (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather Rediction by Numerical 
Processes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922); Peter Lynch, The Emergence of Numerical Weather 
Prediction: Richardson’s Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 
4 Friedman, Appropriating the Weather; Mott T. Greene, Alfred Wegener: Science, Exploration, and the Theory of 
Continental Drift (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015). 
5 Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine. Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, 
MA; London: MIT Press, 2010); Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ 
and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39,” Social 
Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387–420. 
6 Paul Edwards, “Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism,” Osiris 21, no. 1 (January 2006): 229–250. 
7 For a focus on the Interbellum and the infrastructure of British colonial developmental meteorology, see: Martin 
Mahony, “For an Empire of ‘all Types of Climate’: Meteorology as an Imperial Science,” Journal of Historical 
Geography 51 (January 2016): 29–39. 
8 Friedman, Appropriating the Weather; Greene, Alfred Wegener.; James Rodger Fleming, Inventing Atmospheric 
Science. Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 
2016). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 
 
 

 
 

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much lesser extent Austria-Hungary,9 the focus in the twentieth century has been on 
thermodynamic modelling and the origins of atmospheric physics in Scandinavia and the United 
States.10  

German aerology’s intermediate position is manifold. First, aerology and weather 
ballooning formed a link between both centuries and specific epochal cultures of science, 
between Victorian networks of Humboldtian scientists calibrating instruments, mountaineering 
and collecting data globally and Cold War atmospheric physicists working with models and 
satellites.11 Second, Germany formed a geographical link: between the land-based empires of the 
East, the British ocean and Scandinavia. Thirdly, Wilhelmine balloon halls and kite launching 
ships that collaborated and competed with Austrian mountain stations linked naval meteorology 
to the physics of the upper air. Fourth, Germany’s imperial ambitions connected longer traditions 
of European imperial fieldwork in polar and tropical meteorology to the German system of 
research universities.12 

Traditionally, the history of German science centers on the development (and sometimes 
its peculiar Sonderweg) of the German nation-state, in the form of the Imperial Germany formed 
by Bismarck between the Belt in the North and the Isar in the South, the Rhine in the West and 
the Memel in the East. Although this article also acknowledges the innovating impetus of the 
politics of German national science politics in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth 
century, it also emphasizes the importance of imperial dimensions and ‘trans-imperial’ networks 
in the history of German science. Thus, I relocate German science within the broader dynamics 
of an international and multidimensional history of the atmospheric sciences.  

This article focuses on the embedding of Wladimir Köppen, a Russian-German scientist, 
into the meteorology of the new German state, a state that was focused on becoming both a 
maritime and a land empire, with Hamburg as an important center for the former and Berlin and 
Strasburg as centers for the latter. Out of this competition emerged a third dimension: the 
atmosphere. A new kind of German empire was born: an aerial empire, explored by a fleet of 
zeppelins and weather balloons. Nationalist and internationalist German scientists worked 

                                                             
9 Katherine Anderson, Predicting the Weather. Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (University of Chicago 
Press, 2010); David Moon, “The Debate over Climate Change in the Steppe Region in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” 
The Russian Review 69, no. 2 (April 2010): 251–275; Deborah R. Coen, “Imperial Climatographies from Tyrol to 
Turkestan,” Osiris 26, no. 1 (January 2011): 45–65; Azadeh Achbari and Frans van Lunteren, “Dutch Skies, Global 
Laws,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46, no. 1 (February 11, 2016): 1–43. 
10 Friedman, Appropriating the Weather; Fleming, Inventing Atmospheric Science.  
11 For ‘Humboldtian science’, see: Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (Kent & 
New York: Dawson, 1978). 
12 See also Philipp Lehmann’s contribution to this issue: “Losing the Field: Franz Thorbecke and (Post)Colonial 
Climatology in Germany,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 145–158. Although several authors have also pointed at 
the important role of Germany in polar meteorology, much analysis on the national and imperial context of these 
aerological projects is still needed: Susan Barr and Cornelia Lüdecke, The History of the International Polar Years 
(IPYs) (Heidelberg: Springer, 2010).  



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together: the ‘free atmosphere’ was something that could be conquered but which left room for 
cooperation with other nations. 

 

Köppen as world-meteorologist 

Before the foundation of the Royal Aeronautical Observatory in Lindenberg in 1905, Wladimir 
Köppen’s own kite station near Hamburg formed a key site for the new aerology. Thanks to 
Köppen’s observatory and the weather kites produced and calibrated at the station, and in 
cooperation with the Lindenberg Observatory, German naval ships started collecting data in the 
tropics and the polar area.  

Wladimir Köppen was chief meteorologist of the Deutsche Seewarte since its foundation 
in 1875, and later father-in-law of Alfred Wegener. In many ways, he was a ‘go-between’ 
between Russian, German and overseas meteorology.13 It is tempting to call Köppen a generalist 
who was reluctant to pursue a further career in plant physiology, the topic of his dissertation, and 
who, through a detour, ended up as a meteorological climatographer famous for his maps and 
climate zones, which are still used today. 14 However, it is more accurate to describe him as a 
Humboldtian scientist who became a ‘world meteorologist’. Recently, Katharine Anderson 
contrasted the Bergen School of dynamic meteorology and atmospheric thermodynamics to the 
earlier and much more comprehensive sphere of ‘world meteorology’ that had partly nurtured it. 
In particular, she offers two main examples: Napier Shaw’s ‘long involvement with the Réseau 
Mondial’, the world network of meteorological stations, and Wladimir Köppen.15 

World meteorologists such as Köppen and Shaw did not oppose the kind of focused 
thermodynamic modelling that later became the Bergen School of Vilhelm Bjerknes, Tor 
Bergeron and Jacob Bjerknes. Quite to the contrary, as my article will show, they played a vital 
role in making this influential school of dynamical meteorology possible, by offering data sets, 
critical support and most of all its infrastructure of observatories and academic expertise. At the 
same time, as Anderson has demonstrated, Shaw, Köppen and others worried about what the 

                                                             
13 Following Kapil Raj, go-betweens have a crucial function in the development of modern science. Kapil Raj, “Go-
Betweens, Travelers, and Cultural Translators,” in A Companion to the History of Science, ed. Bernard Lightman 
(Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 39–57, 44. Building on the German sociologist Georg Simmel, Raj 
distinguishes ‘wanderers’ from ‘strangers’: the first comes and goes, the second comes and stays. Meteorology was 
not only constructed by wanderers such as Alexander von Humboldt or Vilhelm Bjerknes, but maybe even more so 
by strangers such as Köppen, Jacob Bjerknes or Carl-Gustaf Rossby, the Scandinavians who brought the Bergen 
School to the United States. Of course, there is a large grey zone between wanderers and strangers. Rossby died in 
Sweden. For more on Rossby, see: Fleming, Inventing Atmospheric Science. 
14 Wladimir Köppen, ‘Wärme und Pflanzenwachsthum’, Bulletin de la Societé Impériale des Naturalistes de 
Moscou, 43.3&4 (1870), 41–110. 
15 Katharine Anderson, “Marine Meteorology: Observing Regimes and Global Visions, 1918-1939,” in Soundings 
and Crossings. Doing Science at Sea, 1800-1970, ed. Katharine Anderson and Helen Rozwadowski (Sagamore 
Beach MA: Science History Publications, 2016), 213–244. 



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Norwegian modelers were to abandon. Instead of studying the atmospheric interactions and 
meteorological phenomena of the globe as a whole, the Bergen School meteorologists focused 
‘on the collection of wind and temperature data within a tightly defined region, and interpreted 
through thermodynamic models of lines of convergence and fronts.’16 

However, Köppen played an important role too in the meteorological studies of 
dynamical weather patterns in the upper atmosphere. It was Köppen who proposed the name 
‘aerology’ for studies of the upper atmosphere in 1906, during a meeting of the International 
Commission for Scientific Aeronautics in Milan.17 Köppen’s new name capitalized on the recent 
designation of a new layer in the atmosphere by the Frenchman Leon Teisserenc de Bort together 
with Assmann: the stratosphere. 

Köppen saw himself above all as a reformer. He himself wrote in 1909 that both the 
1860s and the 1890s had seen important revolutions in the history of meteorology, in which he 
himself had played a large role in making Germany catch up with the rest.18 He presented 
aerology as the fifth and possibly final phase in the progressive history of ‘land meteorology’, a 
phase which had started in the 1890s. According to Köppen, a first ‘age of legends’ had lasted 
from Babylonian to early modern times, followed by an era of quantification (1643-1817). Then 
came the periods of climatology (1817-1855) and synoptic meteorology (1855-1893). Gradually, 
land meteorology had increasingly connected to maritime meteorology and its science of 
storms.19 According to Köppen, instruments and technologies had provoked these revolutions: 
barometers, isothermic maps, daily weather maps, weather kites and unmanned balloons. 
Balloons and kites had brought the third dimension of altitude and what would turn out to be a 
layered atmosphere into mapping global weather. 

Köppen also was also reflective about financial resources. To his joy, in recent history the 
German state had finally followed where private American and French money had originally 
taken the lead. In the field of synoptic meteorology, Germans had only caught up decades later, 
with the establishment of the Seewarte. Now, Köppen was more confident about the important 
role of Germany in aerology.20 Of course, his model above all legitimated the way he had 
innovated the field of meteorology himself. He had worked on climate statistics in the 1850s, 
exported the daily weather map from the Russian Empire to Imperial Germany in the 1870s and 
1880s, and finally adopted weather kites around 1900. After that he had used his position at the 
Maritime Observatory to bring the new three-dimensional meteorology outside Europe, in order 

                                                             
16 Ibid. 
17 Frederik Nebeker, Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century (San Diego: Academic Press, 1995), 
48; Hugo von Hergesell, “The Development of Aerology. A Retrospect and a Glance into the Future,” Quarterly 
Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 53 (September 10, 1927): 78.  
18 Köppen, “Wissenschaftliche Luftschiffahrt,” 105–106. 
19 Köppen, “Die Wechselwirkung,” 19. 
20 Köppen, “Wissenschaftliche Luftschiffahrt,” 105–106. 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 
 
 

 
 

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to connect maritime and continental meteorology. To do this, he used the ‘free atmosphere’ as a 
bridge.  

Before analyzing the construction of meteorology as a discipline in imperial German 
discipline through Köppen’s work, it is necessary to disentangle and recombine the twin pillars 
of this discipline: the German state and the German-speaking world. 

 

The German state 

Germany and the German-speaking world are somewhat underrepresented in the Anglophone 
histories of dynamic meteorology, climate science and atmospheric physics.21 Although some 
historians have referred to the role of German meteorologists in designating the stratosphere in 
1902 and establishing important meteorological institutes, they do so always in the context of 
other developments, such as the analysis of Germany’s national culture of balloonists, or in the 
background of Vilhelm Bjerknes and Bergen School in dynamic meteorology.22 However, 
recently, Mott Greene’s biography of Alfred Wegener has created momentum for a more 
structural analysis of German aerology as a key field in the reformations in global meteorology: 
Wegener played a large role in the German academic landscape of ‘cosmic physics’ and 
ballooning.23  

In the decade before the Great War, Germany played a key role in the new science of 
atmospheric physics because of its investment in a dense network of stations for unmanned 
balloons and kites. Between 1900 and 1914 several German state agencies started investing in 
global weather balloon ascents. The German navy invested in expeditions, a global network of 
measuring stations and a kite station near Hamburg. At the new meteorological institute of the 
Alsace Reichsland in Strasburg, the president of the International Committee of Scientific 
Aeronautics, Hugo Hergesell, coordinated international balloon ascents. He worked closely 
together with the Prince of Monaco on his ship the Princesse Alice, joined by the French and 
Italian navies; and in 1905 the Emperor Wilhelm II chartered the Royal Prussian Aeronautical 
Observatory under the directorship of Richard Assmann, who had emerged as an important 
figure in the Berlin campaigns for scientific ballooning in the 1890s.24 

                                                             
21 As are France and Soviet Russia, but I will leave this to others. For a German language overview of climate 
science, see: Matthias Heymann, “Klimakonstruktionen,” NTM 17 (2009): 171–197.  
22 Sabine Höhler, Luftfahrtforschung und Luftfahrtmythos: wissenschaftliche Ballonfahrt in Deutschland, 1880-1910 
(Frankfurt am Main; New York: Campus, 2001); Friedman, Appropriating the Weather. Also, see footnotes below. 
23 Greene, Alfred Wegener. 
24 B. Tinz and G Rosenhagen, ‘Archiv der überseeischen Stationen der Deutschen Seewarte’, ProMet. 
Meteorologische Fortbildung, 37.1/2 (2011), 53–61; Alfred De Quervain, ‘Über die Bestimmung der Bahn eines 
Registrierballons am internationalen Aufstieg vom 2. Juli 1903 in Strassburg’, Beiträge zur Physik der Freien 
Atmospäre, 1.1 (1904); Richard Assmann, Der Königlich Preussische Aeronautische Observatorium Lindenberg 
(Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1915). 



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German weather ballooning was a form of Bismarckian Realpolitik that evolved into 
Wilhelmine Weltpolitik. he initiative did not only come top-down but was also the result of a 
global mindset of German institutions25 enthusiastically taking up and expanding the politics and 
directives of unification and colonialism that emanated from Berlin. Scientists lobbied for 
national institutes on the level of the Reich, institutes that moved beyond the role usually taken 
up by the smaller state-based academies and hilfswissenschaftliche Institute (‘assisting science 
institutes’ such as observatories, gardens and collections) in the margins of German research 
university. After the unification of Germany, Bismarck supported scientific institutes that could 
help create legal structures for the Reich superseding the member states and the individual 
universities, such as the Reichsgesundheitsamt [Imperial Health Department] in 1870, the 
Statistische Reichsamt (1872), the Monumenta Germaniae Historiae 1886) and the Physikalisch-
Technischen Reichsanstalt (1887).  

With the Reichsanstalt, Germany also became an important global player in the 
standardization of instruments, with far reaching possibilities of imperial control; science, state 
and industry became more effective in coordinating their research agendas. In the board of the 
institute not only members of the government, the Army and the Navy took part, but in it 
meteorological instrument makers such as Rudolf Fuess collaborated with meteorologists such as 
Neumayer and Von Bezold: all three of them were board members of the Reichsanstalt. As a 
consequence, German meteorologists in Lindenberg and Berlin focused heavily on instrument-
based research-technologies.26 As Helmut Trischler has also shown, in a study on scientific 
aeronautics in general and engineering in particular, the supporting role of the German state and 
especially the military was pivotal in the development of twentieth century aviation research.27 In 
this article the focus will be on the Navy; but the Army was a also large benefactor of 
aeronautics. 

For the field of meteorology the year 1875 was crucial, when the Norddeutsche Seewarte 
[North German Maritime Observatory], financed by Hamburg and Bremen Chambers of 
Commerce, only three years old, became re-established as the Deutsche Seewarte, now as an 
imperial institute paid for by the Empire. Under Wilhelm II as emperor (1888-1918) these 
institutes became instruments for global expansion and he added many more scientific institutes, 
with the Kaiser Wilhelms Gesellschaft as its most famous legacy, but for meteorology especially 

                                                             
25 On institutional agency, see: Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 
1986). 
26 Cahan, An Institute for an Empire, 75-76; Terry Shinn, Research-Technology and Cultural Change (Oxford: 
Bardwell Press, 2008). See also the many instruments in: Assmann, Königlich Preussische Aeronautische 
Observatorium Lindenberg. 
27 Helmuth. Trischler, Luft- und Raumfahrtforschung in Deutschland: 1900-1970. Politische Geschichte einer 
Wissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992). 



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important was the foundation of the Aeronautical Observatory under the emperor’s patronage, 
the flagship of the new aerology.28 

But the German culture of national science was also a bottom-up culture, in dialogue with 
top-down politics. Sabine Höhler has already demonstrated the surge in scientific ballooning in 
Germany between 1880 and 1910. According to her, this surge was the product of a culture of 
imperialism and nationalism organized from ‘below’, an alliance of national myth-making 
between individual scientific ‘Daedalus-figures’ on the one hand and a bourgeois culture of 
aeronautical societies on the other. 29 Höhler expanded Peter Fritzsche’s notion of Germany as a 
‘nation of fliers’ in the first three decades of twentieth century, a culture that produced Zeppelins 
and hang glider cults.30 Although Höhler’s focus on the importance of society and culture is vital 
for understanding the development of a German scientific lobby for meteorological ballooning, 
this article wants to bring back the imperial state in the global diplomacy of meteorological 
‘aeronautics’, or to be more precise, the new global science of ‘aerology’.31 German 
meteorologists played a significant role in international committees that legitimized state 
institutes of science. Scientists in the International Meteorological Congresses and its aeronautics 
committees did not represent universities but national institutes.  

 

The German-speaking world 

However, these national institutes had freely exchanged German-speaking scientists with 
different kinds of historical affiliations. Existing national histories have not, however, been able 
to fully explain the international commitment of German scientific ballooning and its role in 

                                                             
28 Georg Schreiber, Deutsche Wissenschaftspolitik von Bismarck bis zum Atomwissenschaftler Otto Hahn, 
Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen. Geisteswissenschaften (Cologne & Opladen: 
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1954), 26–27. More on German science policy and academic disciplines: Peter Lundgreen et 
al., Staatliche Forschung in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1986); David Cahan, An Institute for 
an Empire: The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 1871-1918 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge 
University Press, 1989); Timothy Lenoir, Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines 
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 
29 Höhler, Luftfahrtforschung und Luftfahrtmythos, 33; 298. 
30 Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers. German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge MA: Harvard 
University Press, 1992); Christoph Rosol, “Rotoren und Leewellen. Figuren der (In-)Stabilität Um 1937,” iLinx. 
Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, no. 1 (2010): 71–97. 
31 Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back in: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State 
Back in, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge 
University Press, 1985), 3–43. More on nationalism, international committees and discipline building: Robert-Jan 
Wille, “Stations and Statistics. Paulus Hoek and the Transnational Discipline of Ocean Biology,” in Soundings and 
Crossings. Doing Science at Sea, 1800-1970, ed. Katharine Anderson and Helen M. Rozwadowski (Sagamore 
Beach MA: Science History Publications, 2016), 179–212. 



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international commissions. They explain why German scientists wanted to compete with Britain, 
but not why they also chose to collaborate.32  

What does explain Germany’s international commitment is its imperial dimension, not 
just Germany’s colonial ambitions, but also Germany’s place in the European balance of 
imperial powers and Germany as Europe’s academic powerhouse. Not only did many students 
from neighboring countries go to study in Germany, but groups of German-speaking scientists 
who used to work for other empires were more and more drawn in, for now they had another 
ambitious empire to work for.33 Germany became the stage for multi-national science workers. 

Of course, between the Congo Conference of 1884 and the First World War, Germany 
had a colonial empire, but even before Bismarck’s ‘Scramble for Africa’ and even before his 
unification of Imperial Germany, Germans had formed part of a global scientific network of 
ethnic Germans and German-speaking scientists from Russia to South America and from the 
North Pole to Africa. By 1850, the community of German meteorologists had already become a 
community with a global outlook, maybe even more due to Germans travelling between the 
central European empires and the Americas in the nineteenth century than due to earlier research 
in the British and Dutch colonies.  

Indeed, many German-speaking scientists had worked for the older sea-based empires in 
the Early Modern Age. But even ignoring the many Germans that worked in the maritime 
empires of the Dutch and British in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries34, many 
were also actively helping the geographical and scientific expansion of the great land empires 
after 1800, old and new. Of course, Austria-Hungary was such an empire, and the scientific 
imperialism of the Habsburgs inspired Germans working in Prussia, Bavaria and the smaller 
German states in the north.35  

These were not just empires in Europe. While German-speaking scientists worked for the 
expansion of Russia in the nineteenth century, others helped the new state of Argentina research, 
conquer and battle the ‘deserts’ and violently bring under state control the natives of Patagonia in 

                                                             
32 Kärin Nickelsen and Fabian Krämer, “Introduction: Cooperation and Competition in the Sciences,” NTM 
Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 24, no. 2 (2016): 119–123. 
33 For a global history of the nineteenth century with a large role for the German-speaking world as a center of 
academic expertise, but with an emphasis on its export instead of import, see: Jürgen Osterhammel, The 
Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press 
2015). For a recent article on meteorology and climatological data collecting as a form of state and nation building 
in Switzerland (in the context of its neighboring countries), and for more about the Swiss meteorologist in Russia 
Heinrich Wild, see: Franziska Hupfer, “Ein Archiv für Wissenschaft, Staat und Nation. Klimatologische 
Datenpraktiken in der Schweiz, 1860-1914”, NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und 
Medizin 25, no. 4 (2017): 435 – 457. 
34 Thomas Biskup and Martin Kohlrausch, “Germany: 2. Colonial Empire,” The Encyclopedia of Empire, 2016, 1–
16, 3. 
35 See for example Coen, The Storm Lab, 479. 



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the Conquista del Desierto between 1878 and 1885.36 Some of these German-speaking scientists 
would move back to Germany, and many of them corresponded with scientists there. For 
German scientists in the nineteenth century, competition or cooperation were in the end just co-
existing modes of reproduction of global knowledge. Some felt that Germany’s mission was to 
become a global center of academic accumulation and to bring academic technocracy to the 
globe, whether it was through peaceful and transnational cooperation, or through wars and 
competitive statecraft. Köppen was one of them, although he preferred the mode of international 
cooperation. 

 

Between state, reform and statistics: a German Russian from Russia to Germany  

Köppen exemplified the global German scientific explorer-bureaucrat because he himself came 
from a family of travelling technocrats. He was born in 1846 in St. Petersburg. His grandfather 
had been a German doctor reorganizing the Charkov state health department under Czarina 
Katharina II; his father worked for the state’s Domains, worked in statistics, ethnography and 
archaeology, and he was a member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Together with a 
group of other scientists, military officers and civil servants, among them many Baltic Germans37, 
Peter von Köppen had founded the Russian Geographical Society in 1845.38 Wladimir later wrote 
that he had been raised by a Russian patriot in a German house; he spoke Russian, German, 
French and Tatar fluently, with a family house on the Krim, where his father had done 
geographical and statistical field work.39  

The Köppen family adhered to an ideology of liberal reform and national unity.40 Because 
of the Russian reform movement in the 1860s, his father acknowledged his son’s wishes to study 
the natural sciences, because ‘Russia will have need of natural scientists’ to ‘exploit its natural 
riches’, and Wladimir was first sent to St. Petersburg to study, at the university.  
                                                             
36 Pedro José Depetris, “Las Ciencias de la tierra en la FCEFyN: breve historia de la investigación científica,” 
Revista Faculdad de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas Y Naturales 1, no. 1 (2014): 99–111. 
37 Such as the zoologist Karl Ernst von Baer, the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve and the admiral-
explorer Adam Johann von Krusenstern 
38 The Geographical Society was an organization that united the opposition to the Vienna Congress conservatism 
Czar Nicholas I and united the forces of progressive nationalism, both panslavic Russians and reform-oriented Baltic 
Germans in coordinating and expanding the scientific exploration of Russia, a country large enough to turn studying 
national geography into the study of global climates. For more on the society’s history, tensions between the Baltic 
Germans and the panslavic Russians, and the exploration of Siberia, see: Mark Bassin, “The Russian Geographical 
Society, the ‘Amur Epoch,’’and the Great Siberian Expedition 1855–1863,” Annals of the Association of American 
Geographers 73, no. 2 (June 15, 1983): 240–256. 
39 Else Wegener-Köppen, Wladimir Köppen. Ein Gelehrtenleben für die Meteorologie, Grosse Naturforscher 
(Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft M. B. H., 1955), 20–23. 
40 He himself thought himself lucky to have lived in two begeisterungsreiche Zeiten, ‘spirited times’. The first was 
the period of Russian reforms between 1860 and 1864, under Czar Alexander II, in the aftermath of the lost Crimean 
War, with the abolishment of serfdom and significant reforms of education, government and the legal system. The 
second was the unification of Germany under Bismarck between 1867 and 1870. Ibid., 17. 



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However, Köppen had to learn to value meteorology as an interesting technocratic field in 
itself first. After the death of his father, his older brother Theodor sent Wladimir to Germany to 
study in Heidelberg, and after visiting the meteorologist Julius von Hann in Vienna, he started to 
study zoology and botany with Wilhelm Hofmeister, because he feared that his meteorology was 
a schädliche Liebhaberei, a ‘harmful hobby’. He later realized however that through his 
meteorology he had learnt to practice ‘the mathematical method’, which he had used as a Hebel, 
a ‘lever’ for the ‘progress’ of the other sciences, and especially his plant physiological 
dissertation.41 

Because of his family home in the Krim, Köppen had learnt to appreciate the climate 
differences in Russia which were ‘larger than in the West of Europe’. Together with his father 
and his siblings, Theodor and Natalie, he took meteorological measurements at home and studied 
plant and animal life. His sister Aline married the director of the Imperial Acclimatization 
Garden in Jalta, not far from home.42 In Heidelberg, Köppen first focused on biological and 
geological studies and only in the margins of his studies did he write a few first meteorological 
articles (on Crimean weather or rainfall in the Heidelberg region, for example) in the Zeitschrift 
der Österreichischen Meteorologischen Gesellschaft (hereafter the Zeitschrift), thanks to the 
connections he had made during his Vienna visit. As a typical German student, he travelled to 
other German cities for additional Bildung, including Leipzig, where he studied with the 
developmental zoologist Rudolf Leuckart. 

In his 1870 dissertation he studied the relationship between plant development and 
warmth, focusing on maize, wheat, peas, broad beans and lupins. Thus, he was able to combine 
his own interest in meteorology with the new plant physiology made popular by German 
botanists such as Julius Sachs43 Köppen wanted to answer ‘questions plant geographers ask plant 
physiology’: the interaction between organism and environment, questions that would later be 
taken up by German colonial botanists and ecologists.44 In the 1860s, Charles Darwin, the 
laboratory, instrumental precision and statistical technologies had created a culture of exchange 
between the natural sciences, the life sciences and meteorology. In that decade Darwin’s half-
cousin Francis Galton moved from weather maps to the study of life, but Köppen went the other 
way.45  

In 1872 Köppen published a long article in the St. Petersburg Academy journal 
Repertorium der Meteorologie, in which he used laws of probability of specific weather types, 

                                                             
41 Ibid., 27–37. 
42 Ibid., 24–26. 
43 Köppen, “Wärme Und Pflanzenwachsthum.” 
44 Köppen, “Wärme und Pflanzenwachsthum,” 42; Eugene Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory: Darwinian Plant 
Ecology in the German Empire, 1880-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 
45 Nicholas W. Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (New 
York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2001), 140–151. 



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based on past weather. Köppen’s work was praised for its effort to tackle a challenging new 
field, connecting data for the benefit of weather prognostication, and an excerpt was published in 
the Zeitschrift.46 Having returned to Russia in 1872, he wrote to Heinrich Wild, the Swiss director 
of the St. Petersburg Central Observatory, inquiring for positions. Wild gave him a job as 
assistant. 

 

An alliance between empires: the Vienna international conference of 1873 

Put in charge of the meteorological library, Köppen learned to create synoptic weather maps, the 
daily production of which started in 1873.47 In the same year he accompanied Wild as the Russian 
delegate to the first International Meteorological Congress in Vienna, organized by Wild, the 
Austrian meteorologist Karl Jelinek in Vienna and the German meteorologist Carl Bruhns in 
Leipzig, a follow–up to a meeting between the Russians, Germans and Austrians held in Leipzig 
in 1872. 

This alliance between the meteorological institutes of the large land-based empires 
mirrored the international shifting balance of power of that time. In the same year that the 
meteorologists assembled at Vienna, Bismarck formed the Dreikaiserabkommen, a treaty that 
later resulted in a league (Bund) between the three emperors Wilhelm I of Germany, Alexander 
II of Russia and Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary. Only two years before, after the defeat of 
France and the German unification in Versailles, Wilhelm had been elevated from king to 
emperor. As his chancellor, Bismarck now tried to rebalance Europe around a new and more 
powerful German Empire.48  

In the same way, meteorologists from Leipzig, Vienna and St. Petersburg unified a 
fragmented landscape of German, Austrian and Baltic German meteorologists, but did so under 
the flag of international cooperation instead of German power play. 

 To Vienna came representatives of state meteorological observatories from the whole of 
Europe, including the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, the United States and China were 
represented by a delegate. Only France was notoriously absent; French scientists in this period 

                                                             
46 Wladimir Köppen, ‘Die Aufeinanderfolge der unperiodischen Witterungserscheinungen nach der 
Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung untersucht’, Meteorologicheskii Sbornik - Repertorium für Meteorologie, 2 (1872), 
187–238; Wladimir Köppen, ‘Auszuge aus die Aufeinanderfolge der unperiodischen Witterungserscheinungen nach 
der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung untersucht’, Zeitschrift der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Meteorologie, 7.22 
(1872), 369–75. This article was also noticed by Nebeker, Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th 
Century, 44. 
47 Wegener-Köppen, Wladimir Köppen, 44; Napier Shaw, Manual of Meteorology 1. Meteorology in History 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 287. 
48 The classic texts here are: Golo Mann, Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 13th ed. (Frankfurt-
am-Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011), 455; Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: 1840-1945, 2nd 
ed. (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 237. 



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were actively avoiding the German-speaking community after the Franco-Prussian war of 1871.49 
However, the ‘enormous British Empire’ (in the words of Köppen) was underrepresented as 
well. Only two meteorologists came, the Scottish Alexander Buchan of Edinburgh and the 
director of the Meteorological Office, the Irish Robert Henry Scott. 50 Scott himself was not a 
stranger to Germany: he had studied chemistry and meteorology among others with Heinrich 
Dove in Berlin and Justus von Liebig in Munich. Another meteorologist with a German 
background was Johan Friedrich Julius Schmidt who represented the observatory at Athens. 
From the 31 official delegates, seven each came from the German Empire and Austria-Hungary. 
Along with the UK, Italy and Belgium also sent two meteorologists each.51  

Thus, although Alexander von Humboldt had written most of his works in French in the 
first half of the century, the geopolitics of international meteorology became more and more 
written and practiced in German. This was a remarkable change in the balance of power; more 
than twenty years earlier, in 1853, the first international conference on maritime meteorology 
had been organized in Brussels by Western powers (American, British, Belgian and Dutch naval 
officers and scientists) and although it was visited by Russians and Scandinavians, neither 
German nor Austrian meteorologists take part.52 It had partly to do with the distinct communities 
of maritime and land-based meteorology, but as they were merging, these communities were also 
fighting for ascendancy within meteorology as a whole.  

In Vienna, the focus was more on the land than on the sea, and the land-based empires 
dominated. However, just as in other spheres of diplomacy, the balance would shift back again. 
Christophorus Buys Ballot from the Dutch Royal Meteorological Institute in Utrecht, active 
behind the curtains of the organization of 1853 and very vocal at the Vienna Conference, had 
proposed in advance a series of observation stations in distant areas and also a central office for 
the exchange of publications; his proposal was not adopted but would become a Leitmotiv for the 
next decades.53 Buys Ballot represented the maritime wing of the international community. 

 Christophorus Buys Ballot was not the only one to propose an international plan. In 
Vienna, Wild suggested that ‘in order to investigate the weather phenomena of the higher strata 
of the atmosphere, more numerous observations should be made on isolated mountain peaks, as 
                                                             
49 Report of the Proceedings of the Meteorological Congress at Vienna. Protocols and Appendices. Translated from 
the Official Report (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1874). 
50 Wegener-Köppen, Wladimir Köppen, 45. 
51 One was sent by Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, China, 
Russia and the United States. Next to the official guests were the visitors: all of them Austrians, except for Köppen 
and August Petermann from the Justus-Perthes publishing house in Gotha, Germany. 
52 Azadeh Achbari, “Building Networks for Science: Conflict and Cooperation in Nineteenth-Century Global Marine 
Studies,” Isis 106, no. 2 (June 2015): 257–282; Azadeh Achbari, Rulers of the Wind. How Academics Came to 
Dominate the Science of Weather, 1830-1870 (Dissertation Free University of Amsterdam, 2017), 57-64. See also 
Kevin Donnelly’s contribution to this issue: “Redeeming Belgian Science: Periodic Phenomena and Global Physics 
in Brussels, 1825-1853,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 54–73. 
53 Report of the Proceedings, 38, 49; Edwards, A Vast Machine, 53. 



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well as in captive balloons’, a proposal which everyone could agree on and which was adopted 
right away.54 However, it would take another twenty years before international coordination of 
scientific ballooning would take place. Other Russians had plans too. Wild’s assistant Mikhail 
Rykachev came that year with an eight-points plan of coordinating international data, including 
the establishment of balloon stations. The editors of the Zeitschrift thought his last point on 
balloons so important that it added a footnote prioritizing this.55  

More striking was that in the beginning of the year Köppen himself had also presented a 
plan in that journal, proposing the foundation of an International Meteorological Institute, most 
likely in the Netherlands, a small, neutral and ‘advanced’ country, where life was cheaper than in 
England and the location central. European countries then needed to build more than 200 
observation stations, with European Russia alone signing up for one hundred. This was clearly 
the plan of a too ambitious young idealist, and the conference members chose to focus on other 
plans.56  

It was Buys Ballot’s plan that had a bigger afterlife. He became the president of the next 
foundational meeting in Utrecht of the International Meteorological Committee, after which 
Wild became president and Scott secretary of the Committee. During the meeting of 1879 the 
Committee became permanent and an International Polar Year was organized at the instigation 
of the Austrian naval officer Karl Weyprecht, with the Austrian Navy establishing itself as a 
colonial power in the Arctic. Through Austria, the sea came back with a vengeance, although the 
conference also saw Hann pleading for building chains of mountain stations, as better 
alternatives to Wild’s balloons.57 Parallel to this development, Imperial German meteorology 
would soon move from a fragmented and state-based orientation on land meteorology, with all 
its observatories before 1870 inland, towards a more expansive policy of coastal meteorology, 
following the establishment of the Seewarte.58  

In 1875 Georg Neumayer (who only became Von Neumayer in 1900), who had visited 
Vienna as the official hydrographer of the German Navy, but who had travelled all over the 
world focusing on terrestrial magnetism and had even worked in Australia, became the new 
director of the German Maritime Observatory.59 He asked Köppen, whom he had met in Vienna 
and was already ‘gloriously known’ (rühmlichst bekannt), to come and join him there.60 Köppen 

                                                             
54 Report of the Proceedings, 58. 
55 Mikhail Aleksandrovich Rykachev, “Weitere Fragen zur Verhandlung für den Meteorologen-Congress zu Wien,” 
Zeitschrift der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Meteorologie 8, no. 13 (1873): 193–203. 
56 Wladimir Köppen, “Über die Errichtung eines Internationalen Meteorologischen Institutes. Vorschlag an den 
Wiener Meteorologischen Congress,” 1873 8, no. 2 (1873): 17–26; Wegener-Köppen, Wladimir Köppen, 46. 
57 Coen, “The Storm Lab,” 469. 
58 Barr and Lüdecke, The History of the International Polar Years (IPYs). 
59 W. Schröder, K. H. Wiederkehr, and K. Schlegel, “Georg von Neumayer and Geomagnetic Research,” History of 
Geo- and Space Sciences 1, no. 2 (2010): 77–87. 
60 Wegener-Köppen, Wladimir Köppen, 51–43. 



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already had a reputation: at that time he had published more than twenty meteorological and 
climatological articles in Russian and Austrian journals in his ‘spare time’.61 From 1876 onwards, 
he would be responsible for the daily synoptic weather map of Imperial Germany.62 

 

The Seewarte: a new German center for meteorology 

The Seewarte was founded as a Centralstelle that serviced the whole of the German Empire with 
gathering data and doing scientific studies benefiting maritime meteorology (the first 
department), meteorological instruments (the second department) and storm warnings.63 In the 
first years Köppen was active in gathering meteorological data, constructing weather maps and 
directing the third department for storm warnings.64 Right from the beginning the Observatory 
recognized the importance of international networks, meetings and cooperation: the Germans 
worked together with the Dutch and Danish navies in making and exchanging data. A Danish 
series of daily charts of the Atlantic now became a dual German-Danish project that would last 
until the First World War.65 The director and his staff members would report from visits to 
different formal and informal conferences and publish these in the annual reports. Köppen 
attended many of these meetings.66 

In 1879 Köppen was promoted to the Observatory’s leading meteorologist, and from that 
time on Köppen had more space to expand what he saw as a more Wissenschaftliche 
meteorology. It was a crucial year in German meteorology, because the second International 
Meteorological Conference in Rome produced a formalized organization, in which Neumayer 
took over from Bruhns the position of member in the International Committee, moving 
meteorological leadership from Leipzig to Hamburg. In the same year, the eminent Humboldtian 
Heinrich Wilhelm Dove of Berlin died, an important German meteorologist in the 1840s but a 
conservative factor in the 1870s, according to many of his contemporaries.67 Because it would 
take until 1885 until a permanent successor was found for Dove, and because Dove had been 
suffering with health problems from the early 1870s, Hamburg took over the German initiative.  

Was Hamburg a center of national renewal? After a visit of Köppen in 1875, Dove had 
told him he would gift his library to the Observatory, but Köppen used his new position to 

                                                             
61 Ibid., 160–161.: Georg Neumayer, ‘Erster Jahresbericht über Organisation und Thätigkeit der Deutschen 
Seewarte, umfassend den Zeitraum vom 1. Januar 1875 bis Schluss des Jahres 1878’, Aus dem Archiv der Deutschen 
Seewarte, 1.1 (1878), p. 6. 
62 Shaw, Manual of Meteorology 1, 287. 
63 Neumayer, “Erster Jahresbericht,” 4–10. 
64 Wegener-Köppen, Wladimir Köppen, 50. 
65 Shaw, Manual of Meteorology 1, 166. 
66 Neumayer, “Erster Jahresbericht,” 10. 
67 Georg Neumayer, “Zweiter Jahresbericht über die Thätigkeit der Deutschen Seewarte für das Jahr 1879,” Aus dem 
Archiv der Deutschen Seewarte 2, no. 3 (1879). See also Achbari, Rulers of the Winds. 



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challenge Dove’s mechanical theory of wind directions.68. For Dove wind direction formed the 
most important factor in weather characteristics, and he had therefore not needed synoptic charts, 
and extrapolated the weather from local measurements. 69 

However, this image ignores the important groundwork in meteorological cartography 
that was lead in the 1880s and 1890s by Köppen, his fellow staff members at the Seewarte and 
contemporaries such as Hann; Köppen was by far not the only one aiming at moving synoptic 
meteorological map-making to frontstage. However, from his unique position at the Seewarte 
Köppen was able to work hard to put Germany on the map as a major power in meteorology in 
these decades. He played a major and decisive role in the foundation of the Deutsche 
Meteorologische Gesellschaft, the German Meteorological Society in 1883, as a consequence of 
the responsibilities taken up by the Germans in the International Polar Year. Until 1889, the 
society would be based at the Seewarte in Hamburg, after which it would move to Berlin.70  

In this decade with Hamburg as Germany’s meteorological center, Köppen himself would 
try to combine all the different meteorologies that existed at that time, publishing 200 articles in 
the next 25 years and monographs in synoptic meteorology, climatology, cloud studies, 
atmospheric circulation above the oceans, cyclone dynamics, plant geography and maritime 
meteorology; from 1905 to 1940 he would write another 300. Most of his articles were written 
for two journals: the half of it appeared in the Meteorologische Zeitschrift, the successor to the 
Austrian Zeitschrift, now aimed at the whole German-speaking world, of which he became editor 
in the year of its foundation, together with Julius von Hann, and another third appeared in the 
Maritime Observatory’s own Annalen der Hydrographie und Maritimen Meteorologie. 71 

His most important monographs in this period were the 1890 Cloud Atlas under the 
auspices of the International Meteorological Conference, edited together with the Swedish Hugo 
Hildebrand Hildebrandsson and Neumayer, the 1899 handbooks Klimalehre and Grundlinien der 
maritimen Meteorologie, and his two attempts in 1884 and 1900 at a map classifying the world’s 

                                                             
68 Köppen, “Wissenschaftliche Luftschiffahrt,” 105; Wegener-Köppen, Wladimir Köppen, 47–54; Gisela Kutzbach, 
The Thermal Theory of Cyclones: A History of Meteorological Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: 
American meteorological Society, 1979). More on Dove and earlier attacks by Buys Ballot, see: Azadeh Achbari, 
Rulers of the Wind, 119-177. 
69 This resistance against synoptic maps has become a topic in the history of meteorology, a topic Köppen would 
contribute to himself. According to Köppen, through Dove meteorology and especially German meteorology had 
entered a phase of stagnation. Later propagators of the Bergen School extended this phase of stagnation to the 1880s 
and 1890s in their own accounts of the history of meteorology: only after 1900, when aerological measurements 
became less sporadic, did meteorology progress again. Tor Bergeron, “Methods in Scientific Weather Analysis and 
Forecasting. An Outline in the History of Ideas and Hints at a Program,” in The Atmosphere and the Sea in Motion. 
Scientific Contributions to the Rossby Memorial Volume, ed. Bert Bolin (New York & Oxford: The Rockefeller 
Institute Press & Oxford University Press, 1959), 451–452. 
70 Cornelia Lüdecke, “Gründung der Deutschen Meteorologischen Gesellschaft (Ära Neumayer 1883-1889),” in: 
Gerd Tetzlaff, Cornelia Lüdecke, and Hein Dieter Behr, eds., 125 Jahre Deutsche Meteorologische Gesellschaft. 
Festveranstaltung am 7. November 2008 im Hamburg (Offenbach: Deutscher Wetterdienst, 2008), 41-47. 
71 Wegener-Köppen, Wladimir Köppen, 160–193. 



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climates combining quantitative meteorology and plant geography, a ‘map of maps’.72 Köppen 
accumulated data, statistics, maps and subdisciplines to create a multidimensional synoptic 
meteorology. Later, in the 1920s, retired and living in the Austrian university city of Graz where 
his son-in-law Alfred Wegener worked, he would with the same mentality absorb Wegener’s 
theory of shifting continents into the new field of paleoclimatology. 

 

Mapping storms and plants 

In Hamburg Köppen developed a third-dimensional look on weather in the process of extending 
the two-dimensional cartographical method. One of the first important transcontinental synoptic 
maps he made in 1881 was based on years of data (1873-1879), collected by him or collected and 
published earlier by, among others, American and Danish meteorologists, on monthly barometric 
minima and its Zugstrassen (a term derived from the American ‘tracks of movement’), a term 
still used today, although his fellow coworker Wilhelm Jacob van Bebber later also used the term 
Zyklonbanen or ‘cyclonic paths’. This map encompassed the whole North Atlantic and the half 
of the neighboring continental masses, from the Rocky Mountains (Felsengebirge) to the Ural 
Mountains.73 It combined synoptic meteorology with a thermal theory of storms, with the arrows 
as an extra interpretive layer over a continental plotting of barometric minima obtained by a form 
of extensive data crunching that was reserved for state bureaucracies or commercial cartography 
firms. 

Köppen’s maps were appreciated by eminent meteorologists. His map was used in 
Hann’s Meteorologischer Atlas, a series of maps published in the third edition of the renowned 
Berghaus Physikalischer Atlas, together with another of his maps of rainfall areas in the world 
which resulted from his climatological map project.74 Hann preferred Köppen’s cyclonic path 
map to that of Van Bebber’s. In general, Hann was impressed by the way German cartography 
had developed in the last decade, referring not only to the maps of the commercial publishing 
house of Justus Perthes, but also to that of institutes such as the Deutsche Seewarte, which also 

                                                             
72 Wladimir Köppen, “Die Wärmezonen der Erde, nach der Dauer der heissen, gemässigten und kalten Zeit und nach 
der Wirkung der Wärme auf die organische Welt betrachtet,” Meteorologische Zeitschrift 1 (1884): 215–226; 
Wladimir Köppen, “Versuch einer Klassifikation der Klimate, vorzugsweise nach ihren Beziehungen zur 
Pflanzenwelt,” Geographische Zeitschrift 6 (1900): 593-611-679. On German plant geography in the nineteenth 
century, see: Nils Güttler, Das Kosmoskop: Karten und ihre Benutzer in der Pflanzengeographie des 19. 
Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014). 
73 Wladimir Köppen, “Die Zugstrassen der barometrischen Minima in Europa und auf den Nordatlantischen Ocean 
und ihr Einfluss auf Wind und Wetter bei uns,” Mitteilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft in Hamburg 4 
(1881): 76–97; Wladimir Köppen, “Erläuterung zur Karte der Häufigkeit und der mittleren Zugstrassen 
barometrischer minima zwischen Felsengebirge und Ural,” Zeitschrift der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für 
Meteorologie 17 (1882): 257. 
74 Julius von Hann, Atlas der Meteorologie. Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas, Abteilung III (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 
1887). 



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functioned as the national scientific naval cartography bureau.75 Cartographic practice 
restructured meteorological thinking.76   

Köppen was transformed by his map and atlas making process: it not only forced him to 
collect data more globally in pursuit of geographical symmetry, with areas that had seen either 
intensive or extensive data hoarding, but it also made him appreciate comparison as a visual 
tool.77 Köppen referred to the clarity and symmetries maps create, especially the Humboldtian 
plant geography map of August Grisebach that appeared in 1867 in Petermanns Geographische 
Mitteilungen [PMG], a very Humboldtian journal, in which he saw all kinds of processes 
‘working together’.78 His later, more complete and well-known climate classification map also 
appeared in PMG, after an attempt to publish his 1900 article there as well had failed.79  

Köppen practiced the kind of Humboldtian science advocated by William Whewell and 
which was practiced by the British tidologist and others, such as Köppen’s main inspirations 
Alfred Russel Wallace and Darwin: science progressed when inductions from different classes of 
knowledge ‘jumped together’.80 In the library of the Seewarte the works of Humboldt, Darwin, 
Wallace and Whewell were in the collection, from the latter both his many studies on tides as a 
volume of his History of the Inductive Sciences. 81 

Köppen did connect several ‘classes of knowledge’, but mostly he jumped together the 
many dimensions of meteorology itself. His meteorology and climatology went beyond the 
second dimension. First, it wanted more than just to map global climate and predict local 
weather: Köppen looked for mathematical theories of large systems, such as cyclones and other 
storms, to which he devoted the most of his articles, as did many of his contemporaries, 
including Hann.82 Second, it wanted to go beyond the separation of land-based and maritime 

                                                             
75 Letters Julius von Hann to Hermann Berghaus, January 31st, 1885 (pages 67-68) and March 3rd, 1886, SPA ARCH 
MFV 19B/1 (nos. 108-109), Gotha Perthes Collection (GPC), Gotha Research Library (GPL). I wish to thank Nils 
Güttler for pointing me at the Hann collection and these letters particularly. 
76 Güttler, Das Kosmoskop. See also: Katharine Anderson, “Mapping Meteorology,” in Intimate Universality: Local 
and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate, ed. James Rodger Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic, and 
Deborah R. Coen (Sagamore Beach MA: Science History Publications, 2006), 69–91. 
77 See also letters Wladimir Köppen to Hermann Berghaus, SPA ARCH MFV 19N/7 (nos. 108-109), GPC, GPL. 
Other letters, addressed to Alexander Supan, are in the Gustav Radde Collection, SPA ARCH PGM 026/2, GPC, 
GPL. 
78 Köppen, “Versuch,” 41. More on printed maps changing the way scientists looked at their own field:Nils Güttler, 
“Scaling the Period Eye: Oscar Drude and the Cartographical Practice of Plant Geography, 1870s–1910s,” Science 
in Context 24, no. 1 (February 3, 2011): 1–41.  
79 Wladimir Köppen, “Klassifikation der Klimate nach Temperatur, Niederschlag und Jahresablauf,” Petermann’s 
Geographische Mitteilungen 64 (1918): 193-203-248. See letter Wladimir Köppen to Alexander Supan, April 28, 
1900 (no. 356), SPA ARCH PGM 026/2, GPC, GPL. 
80 William Whewell, Novum Organon Renovatum, Being the Second Part of the Philosophy of the Inductive 
Sciences, 3rd ed. (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1858), 88. 
81 See author index of Katalog der Bibliothek der Deutschen Seewarte (Hamburg: Hammerich & Lesser, 1890). 
82 Kutzbach, The Thermal Theory of Cyclones, 90, 150; Coen, “The Storm Lab,” 469.  



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meteorology.83 Third, it combined meteorology and climatology with the study of biology, 
geology and historical development.84 In 1898, after starting his first kite experiments, the third 
dimension for Köppen became the study of the upper atmosphere, as an important ‘layer’ to 
study atmospheric circulation, a topic that was related to cyclogenesis.85 

For Köppen cloud-atlases were different from meteorological maps, as they were not so 
much atlases demonstrating models, theories and data, but important instruments for measuring 
travelling clouds. They were the first global standardized tools for studying the upper 
atmosphere. According to an 1890 atlas ‘observations taken at the bottom of the atmospheric 
ocean are plainly insufficient to determine its circulation’.86 According to meteorologists such as 
Hann, circulation of the atmosphere at lower heights must be influenced by atmospheric 
movement at higher altitudes, especially because of the big temperature differences between the 
poles and the equator, but it was hard to observe circulation at higher altitudes. In 1888 Köppen 
had already written about the importance of air balloons, next to measuring the speed of cirrus 
clouds visible from the ground (for which a standardized terminology and an extensive network 
of telegraphs was needed), for studying the circulation of the atmosphere in temperate zones.87 
Others had picked up this theme too in the same year. Among them was Wilhelm von Bezold, 
the new director of the Royal Prussian Meteorological Institute in Berlin since 1885.88 In the 
1890s a new, more aggressive culture of scientific ballooning emerged in Germany, especially in 
Berlin and the larger cities of the south of Germany. In 1902 Köppen found a way to take part: 
his weather kites. 

 

Joining Von Bezold’s culture of scientific ballooning: a kite station 

Von Bezold knew what to do: claim back the German pole position in meteorology from the 
Seewarte. Coming from Munich and being very interested in the atmospheric circulation above 
and around the mountains, he had made a pact with a new kind of ‘shipmen’, the Luftschiffer, the 
‘airshipmen’ manning balloons. At the hundredth meeting of the Deutsche Verein zur Förderung 
der Luftschiffahrt (‘German Society for the Advancement of Ballooning’) he proposed 
cooperation between this Society and his Meteorological Institute, creating a new field and 

                                                             
83 Köppen, “Die Wechselwirkung.” 
84 Köppen, “Versuch,” 41. 
85 Later, he would refer to the German-British astrophysicist Arthur Schuster, who mused about changing a two-
dimensional meteorology into a three-dimensional one: Köppen, “Wissenschaftliche Luftschiffahrt,” 105. 
86 Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson, Wladimir Köppen, and Georg Neumayer, Wolken-Atlas. Atlas des nuages. 
Cloud Atlas. Moln-atlas. (Hamburg: Gustav W. Seitz Nachf. & Besthorn Gebr., 1890). 
87 Wladimir Köppen, “Die allgemeine Cirkulation der Atmosphäre,” Humboldt. Monatsschrift für die gesamten 
Naturwissenschaften 7 (1888): 449, 452. 
88 Wilhelm von Bezold, “Die Bedeutung der Luftschiffahrt für die Meteorologie,” Naturwissenschaftliche 
Wochenschrift 3, no. 11 (1888): 81–86; Wilhelm von Bezold, Das Königliche Preussische Meteorologische Institut 
in Berlin und dessen Observatorium in Potsdam (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1890).  



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decade of scientific ballooning.89 Support from the Emperor and the army resulted in 75 flights 
with manned balloons and a three-volume work, in which Richard Assmann and Arthur Berson 
took over the practical initiative from Von Bezold.90  

The power of the society movement and of the nationalist ideology supporting the 
scientific campaign has already been demonstrated by Höhler,91 but it is important to realize that 
the meteorologist’s nationalism was more a form of imperialism combined with what Paul 
Forman and Geert Somsen have called ‘olympic’ internationalism, 92 a firm belief by 
contemporaries in the universality of science and in nations as mere vehicles of a noble battle on 
a global stage.  

However, national mythologies were created, both by German scientists and their 
competitors. In order to legitimate the Berlin campaign, Assmann turned to the lack of 
systematic scientific ballooning in the past: here was a mission for Germany’s airshipmen. He 
categorized their French predecessors, from Louis Gay-Lussac to Albert Tissandier, as sharp 
observers, but somewhat impressionable and prone to fantasy, whereas the British balloonists 
such as James Glaisher had done their measurements in the 1850s in a more machine-like mode, 
without observing the clouds. Of course, the country of philosophy and precision technology had 
to save the day.93  

Most of the speeches made by German meteorologists on aeronautical research, either for 
an international or a national audience, focused on national policy and the build-up of empire as 
mere practical resources for their kind of science. As soon as the cooperation with the 
aeronautical societies became less necessary with the coming of unmanned balloons, national 
identity building in meteorology became less important. National pride was often trumped by 
global disciplinary pride: Assmann wrote elsewhere that he wanted to use balloons to change 
meteorology from a statistical science into a more prestigious science of physics.94 

Moreover, Von Bezold’s alliance with the military does not so much reveal a new wave 
of military nationalism in meteorology, but an appropriation of an alliance that had been normal 
in maritime meteorology. Air balloon meteorology would become as important for the army (a 
distinct air force would only emerge decades later) as maritime meteorology for the navy. The 
alliance between Von Bezold, the emperor and the army was above all strategic. 

                                                             
89 Von Bezold, “Die Bedeutung der Luftschiffahrt.” 
90 Otto Baschin et al., Wissenschaftliche Luftfahrten ausgeführt vom Deutschen Verein zur Förderung der 
Luftschiffahrt in Berlin, 3 volumes, ed. Richard Assmann and Arthur Berson (Braunschweig, 1899). 
91 Höhler, Luftfahrtforschung und Luftfahrtmythos. 
92 Paul Forman, “Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists: The Ideology and Its Manipulation in 
Germany after World War I,” Isis 64 (1973): 154; Geert J. Somsen, “A History of Universalism: Conceptions of the 
Internationality of Science from the Enlightenment to the Cold War,” Minerva 46, no. 3 (September 24, 2008): 366. 
93 Baschin et al., Wissenschaftliche Luftfahrten 1, 91. 
94 Richard Assmann and Arthur Berson, Ergebnisse der Arbeiten am Aëronautischen Observatorium in den Jahren 
1900 und 1901 (Berlin: A. Asher & Co, 1902), 1. 



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115 

But martial nationalism was a factor not to be ignored. It partly explains why Köppen 
may have been hesitating to take full part in the balloon movement right away at the outset, as 
opposed to his future son-in-law Wegener who partook enthusiastically as a young man in that 
period.95 Köppen was an active internationalist. At that time he had felt very uncomfortable with 
the situation in his native Russia, where the reactionary Czar Alexander III in the 1880s and 
1890s tried Russifying the country.96 Köppen did not only contribute to global standards for 
meteorology and geography, but also joined the Esperanto movement founded by the Russian-
Polish-Jewish Ludwik Zamenhof. He translated his own meteorological articles for the Esperanto 
Internacia Science Revuo, including an 1893 article of his on geographical names, always a 
problem for meteorologists dealing with several languages and scripts (especially Latin and 
Cyrillic).97 Köppen felt more comfortable welding and extending empires at the border than 
marching to the drums in the interior.  

But when the Berlin meteorologists slowly moved away from manned balloons launched 
on public sport terrains and started developing cheaper technologies such as unmanned balloons 
and kites, and were taking experiments in private institutes in the United States and France as a 
more interesting model, Köppen jumped aboard.98 In 1896 Abott Rotch, who had visited 
Köppen’s Seewarte in 1894,99 had started launching a series of kites carrying self-recording 
instruments in Blue Hill in Massachusetts, and in the same year Léon Teisserenc de Bort 
established a private observatory in Trappes, near Paris.100  Kites formed a good and relatively 
cheap technology to study the temperature, humidity and movement of air in the ‘free 
atmosphere’ at different heights.101 

 

A third player: Hergesell, Strasburg and rapprochement between France and Germany 

Köppen was not the only German who had wanted to jump aboard Von Bezold’s balloon and 
kite movement. A new person to play a big role was Hugo Hergesell, who worked at the 
meteorological institute of Strasburg in the German-occupied Alsace. But Hergesell was a smart 
diplomat who invested a lot in cooperating with his French colleagues. His attempts mirrored an 

                                                             
95 Wegener became a balloonist in 1905 during his Berlin study period, where Von Bezold had motivated his 
students become a member of the Deutsche Verein: Greene, Alfred Wegener, 82. 
96 Wegener-Köppen, Wladimir Köppen, 31. 
97 Wladimir Köppen, “Pri la skribado de la nomoj geografiaj en la kartoj diverslandaj,” Internacia Scienca Revuo 5, 
no. 56 (1908): 229–231. 
98 G. Lachmann, “Neue Drachenexperimente,” Zeitschrift für Luftschifffahrt und Physik der Atmosphäre 13 (1894): 
301–303. 
99 Wladimir Köppen, “Bericht über die Erforschung der freien Atmosphäre mit Hülfe von Drachen,” Aus dem Archiv 
der Deutschen Seewarte 24, no. 1 (1901): 4. 
100 Shaw, Manual of Meteorology 1, 224. 
101 Georg Neumayer, “Einundzwanzigster Jahresbericht über die Tätigkeit der Deutschen Seewarte für das Jahr 
1898,” Annalen der Hydrographie und Maritimen Meteorologie, no. 2 (1899): 52. 



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116 

earlier period of official rapprochement between Germany and France in the 1880s, when 
Bismarck had actively supported a new wave of active French colonialism, to divert France from 
thinking about the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.102  

Just like Köppen, Hergesell found out while working in the French Vosges mountains, 
close to his Alsace station, that kites were ideal instruments for places that received wind from 
the sea.103 When in September the International Meteorological Conference came to Paris, the 
question of scientific balloons and kites was added last-minute, so that only Von Bezold and the 
new directors of state meteorological institutes in Strasburg and Munich, Hergesell and Fritz Erk 
were able to attend, with many others absent. After negotiations between the French, the 
Germans, the American Rotch and the Russian Rykachev, a technological committee 
coordinating international balloon and kite soundings was established: Von Hergesell became its 
president. After Berlin, Strasburg became a second point of gravity in German sounding of the 
upper atmosphere, at the border with France.104  

Just as in the Seewarte, international exchange prompted national innovation. It was on a 
visit to St. Petersburg and the magnetic observatory at Pavlovsk that Köppen for the first time 
saw a Hargraves at work, one of the better functioning kites.105 During these years he started 
communicating with Rotch and Teisserenc de Bort on building kites and visited Teisserenc de 
Bort at his new international ‘Franco-Scandinavian’ kite station in Danish Hald.106 In 1902 he 
prepared a 100 page report on American, Russian and French practices, the use of different types 
of kites (Malay or Hargraves, for example), attaching specific lightweight instruments to them, 
working with lyres, finding an area far away from tramways and electric wires. He soon became 
the central kite expert, creating his own kite models, and in 1901 he organized kites for the 
German Antarctic Expedition of 1901.107 

When in 1902 Hergesell’s International Aerological Committee met in Berlin, for five 
days, including presentations on balloons by Rykachev, Teisserenc de Bort, Von Bezold, 

                                                             
102 Also, Bismarck had wanted to drive a wedge between France and England. Later, the German-French 
relationship became somewhat more strained again, but the French would not again disappear from the international 
stage of science. Nathan Orgill. “Between Coercion and Conciliation; Franco-German Relations in the Bismarck 
Era, 1871-1890”, in: Carine Germond and Henning Türk, A History of Franco-German Relations in Europe; From 
‘Hereditary Enemies’ to Partners (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 49-60, 55. 
103 Hugo Hergesell, ‘Report of the Proceedings of the International Committee for Scientific Aeronautics’, appendix 
II, Report of the International Meteorological Committee, Southport 1903 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery 
Office, 1904), 29; hereafter Report ICSA. 
104 Hugo Hergesell, “Die Wissenschaftliche Luftschiffahrt auf der Internationalen Meteorologenconferenz in Paris,” 
Zeitschrift für Luftschifffahrt und Physik der Atmosphäre 15 (1896): 241–245. 
105 Köppen, “Bericht über die Erforschung,” 5. 
106 See for example letters Lawrence Abott Rotch to Wladimir Köppen, July 8th 1901, no. 1377; Léon Teisserenc de 
Bort to Wladimir Köppen, October 20th, 1899, no. 1745 and August 11, 1902, no. 1747, Köppen Correspondence 
(Ms 2054), University Library Graz (UBG); [Léon Teisserenc de Bort], Travaux de la station franco-scandinave de 
sondages aériens à Hald 1902-1903 (Viborg: E. V. Backhausens Bogtrykkeri, 1904), 6. 
107 Köppen, “Bericht über die Erforschung,” 10. 



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117 

Assmann and Hergesell himself, Köppen joined the committee in a session on kites. In this 
session, Rotch and Berson also presented. On this committee, a new entente was organized 
between the Germans, the Russians and the French. After more than a decade of diplomatic talks, 
Hergesell and Von Bezold had succeeded in bringing the French into a new campaign of 
international balloon ascents. Because they had to find common standards, only after which they 
could start coordinating the ascents, the Germans had abandoned manned balloons in the period 
1896-1900 for the ballon-sonde that was much more popular in France.108 Also, a year before, 
Assmann had invented a new type of rubber balloon that was able to expand, keeping a relatively 
constant velocity of ascent, delivering more reliable data, and which was easier to recover 
because it burst at maximum height.109 

Now, when Köppen took to the stage and spoke about his 100-page report and his years 
of kite experiments, Hergesell immediately decided to appropriate his work for the Committee 
and sent a telegram to the vice-admiral of the Navy, Alfred von Tirpitz, thanking him for the 
support of Köppen’s experiments (‘the most important experiments that have come out of 
maritime meteorology recently’) and the wish of the international committee for more structural 
support for Köppen’s new Hamburg kite station.110 Other resolutions of the conference were 
aimed at extending the European networks of simultaneous ascents to the other large continental 
masses such as North America, as well as the large mass of British India. It must have had a 
certain effect: in 1905 Köppen was able to send a fellow staff member, Wilhelm Brennecke, with 
his kites on the SMS Planet on a scientific expedition to the South Atlantic and the Pacific. 

  

The Planet expedition and Germany’s new oceanic empire 

The Planet was the second substantial scientific expedition organized by the German Navy, and 
the first in which the Seewarte played a large role. In 1874, only a year after the British 
Challenger started sailing around the world, the young state of Germany had sent the Gazelle for 
an expedition around the world, a Prussian warship rebuilt into an Imperial vessel with a research 
mission, with one official scientist added. It was also a reconnaissance mission: it had anchored 
at several places at the Eastern shores of New Guinea. Ten years later, during the Berlin 
Conference of 1884, it was not just Africa that was carved up by the European imperial powers 
under the leadership of Bismarck. Western Melanesia also became the subject of a scramble: in 

                                                             
108 Protokoll über die vom 20. bis 25. Mai 1902 zu Berlin abgehaltene dritte Versammlung der Internationalen 
Kommission für Wissenschaftliche Luftschiffahrt (Strasburg: M. DuMont-Schauberg, 1903), 14–17. 
109 Paul Beelitz, Radiosonden (Berlin: Verl. Technik, 1954), 90; John L. DuBois, Robert P. Multhauf, and Charles 
A. Ziegler, The Invention and Development of of the Radiosonde with a Catalog of Upper-Atmosphere Telemetering 
Probes in the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC: Smithsonian 
Institution Press, 2002), 8. 
110 Protokoll, 61. 



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118 

1886, Gustav von Schleinitz, captain of the Gazelle, became the first Landshauptmann of 
German New Guinea. 

 Between the Gazelle and the Meteor expedition organized between 1925 and 
1927, the subject of Penelope Hardy’s article in this issue of the History of Meteorology and a 
product of Weimar nationalism,111 two other ships were sent out by the German Navy for official 
scientific expeditions large enough to publish results afterwards. One was the Planet expedition 
of 1906-1907 and the other the Möwe-expedition of 1911. Other high-profile scientific 
expeditions sent out by Germany between the Gazelle and the Meteor used civilian ships 
specially purchased for the projects and sold afterwards: the National (Plankton Expedition, 
1898-1899), and the two Antarctic expeditions with the Gauss (1901-1903) and the Deutschland 
(1911-1912). Of all these expeditions, the Valdivia and Meteor expeditions had commanded the 
most scientists: 10 and 11 respectively. However, the Planet was exceptional too: already two 
years after its homecoming the results were published.112 The Planet would set a new model, in an 
age of faster science, focused more on oceanography and meteorology than on marine biology.  

This development coincided with the growth of observation stations ‘of the second and 
third order’ outside Europe sending data to the Seewarte. There were fewer than 10 stations 
before the 1880s, mainly sending data out of South America; ten more stations in Labrador and 
Southwest Africa were added in the 1880s; and ten more in East Africa in the 1890s, when 
German activity in the North Pole and the new colonies grew. The boom came between 1900 and 
1914, with more than 180 stations reporting in 1910, almost all of them from Africa and to a 
lesser extent the Pacific.113 The Planet (and later the Möwe) travelled through all these areas of the 
new German empire: the African coast and through the Indian Ocean to the Bismarck 
archipelago, not only doing aerological research but also collecting ethnographical objects. 

 However, the Planet expedition should not only be seen within the context of a series of 
national expeditions sent out by Imperial Germany and as an extension of the German Navy into 
its expanding colonial empire. The Planet was also an instrument of the new transnational 
aerology of the time.  

 

The trans-imperial expedition 
                                                             
111 Penelope K. Hardy, “Meteorology as Nationalism on the German Atlantic Expedition, 1925-1927,” History of 
Meteorology 8 (2017): 124–144. 
112 The early expeditions organized before the Planet took on average almost 28 years to fully publish their results, 
although this often depended on the last marine biologist describing all the caught specimens. The three expeditions 
after the Planet took on average a little more than six years: here, oceanographers and meteorologists working 
closely with the Navy to get the data out relatively fast. H. G. Gierloff-Emden, Lehrbuch der allgemeinen 
Geographie. Geographie des Meeres, Ozeane und Küsten 1 (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 123–
125. Gierloff-Emden also mentions the three private German expeditions to the North Pole in the 1860s before the 
unification, the Grönland, Germania and Hansa. 
113 Tinz and Rosenhagen, “Archiv der Überseeischen Stationen der Deutschen Seewarte.” 



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119 

Between 1896 and 1902 the network of weather balloons had focused on Europe, Russia and the 
United States; in 1902 Assmann’s aeronautical institute in Berlin started daily ascents, as well as 
daily telegraphing the weather data to the Seewarte so that Köppen could process these together 
with his own kite measurements in his daily weather maps and reports. Three years later, 
Assmann would move to a new observatorium in Lindenberg.  

Over the next ten years, Europeans and Americans joined hands in bringing these 
networks to the oceans and other continents. Hergesell had been able to borrow the Princesse 
Alice of the Prince of Monaco and the Sleipner of the German Emperor in these years to study 
the upper atmosphere in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; he also went to Spitzbergen; Rotch 
and Teisserenc did the same on the Otaria in others parts of the Atlantic; in 1905 and 1906 
Alfred Wegener had left Lindenberg Observatory as an assistant to aerological measurements as 
the official meteorologist on the Danmark expedition to Greenland and asked Köppen to send 
some of his kites; later, he would rent a cabin on the steamship Tübingen to Montevideo and 
Buenos Aires; Italian ships had gone to the Indian Ocean; Lindenberg sent Arthur Berson to 
Lake Victoria and Nyassa; Willem van Bemmelen would do measurements at the Royal 
Magnetic and Meteorological Laboratory in Batavia, and connected his findings on ‘westerlies’ 
to those of Lindenberg in Africa.114 

 

The practice of kite science in the tropical seas 

The Planet was in 1906 the first to extend aerological measurements to the South Atlantic, 
Indian and Pacific Oceans. The ship was equipped with the most modern instruments, with the 
Seewarte organizing all meteorological and oceanographic instruments. The ship had an electric 
motor lyre (Köppen himself had at the Seewarte only one that burned on denatured alcohol),115 
thirty kites, 48 balloons, nine kite meteorographs (or baro-thermo-hygrographs), six 
anemometers and a Fuess ‘aspiration psychrometer’, among others. Especially the psychrometer 
was important: it was developed by Richard Assmann and the Berlin instrument maker Wihelm 
Fuess and had by then become a key instrument in the international aerology campaigns.116 
Köppen’s kite report was also in the ship’s library, as was his Maritime Meteorologie, Hann’s 

                                                             
114 Höhler, Luftfahrtforschung und Luftfahrtmythos, 296–304; Shaw, Manual of Meteorology 1, 224; Alfred 
Wegener, Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1911); Willem van Bemmelen, Die 
Erforschung des Tropischen Luftozeans in Niederländisch-Ost-Indien. Luftfahrt und Wissenschaft 5 (Berlin: Julius 
Springer, 1913); Adolf Miethe, Hugo Hergesell, and Prinz Heinrich, Mit Zeppelin Nach Spitzbergen: Bilder von der 
Studienreise der Deutschen Arktischen Zeppelin-Expedition (Berlin: Bong, 1911). On the Danmark expedition and 
the first letter of Alfred Wegener to Wladimir Köppen, March 28th, 1906, no. 1, Wegener-Köppen Archive HS 1968 
595 (WK), Deutsches Museum (DM), Munich; on the Montevideo trip, see, December 14h, 1909, no. 7. See also 
ICSA Reports Southport 1903, Paris 1907 and Berlin 1910. 
115 Köppen, “Wissenschaftliche Luftschiffahrt,” 108. 
116 Höhler, Luftfahrtforschung und Luftfahrtmythos, 223. 



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120 

Klimatologie and the first issue of a new journal founded by Hergesell and Assmann, the 
Beiträge zur Physik der freien Atmosphäre.  

It was not Brennecke but the Planet’s young officer Schweppe who was taught how to 
use kites by Köppen at the Seewarte, and instructed in using balloons by Hergesell in Strasburg. 
After arriving in the Pacific officer Schlenzka then took over.117 The crew had to practice 
regularly, because the ‘method of kite and balloon work on board was still in a stage of 
development’ and they had to practice in the Bay of Biscay. At the first ‘station’, with 5 kites 
attached to an 8 kilometers line, albeit invisible because of a cloud deck at 400 meter altitude, the 
line broke, and they lost 1 km of wire and one kite.  

Aerology on a ship was a different endeavor. The person in charge of the kite ascent also 
needed to be in charge of the ship’s maneuvering. The ship had to find a good position in the 
wind to get the kite up in the air (with the help of a lyre), with the kite attached to the mast at 
first. They found that there were no rules for the ship’s ideal speed. The ascent of balloons was 
another thing: special diagrams and formulas were needed to fill the balloons with the right 
amount of gas, so that – with the ship’s speed and the weight of the instruments in mind – the 
ascent and descent were relatively stable. The ship also had to retrieve the balloon again at sea; 
most of the time quite soon after the ascent the balloon was lost out of sight, even with clear 
skies.118 Kiting on water meant paying less attention to the wire – the free oceanic space was less 
destructive – but more to the kite itself, which often did not survive a crash in the ocean.119  

 

Opening up colonial skies 

Having travelled further to Lisbon’s Torre de Belem, the officers mused about Vasco da Gama 
and Humboldt who had travelled to the Cape of Good Hope, India and America, and concluded 
that the ‘scientific disclosure’ of the world was still not finished. On the first Thursday of the 
month, an ‘international day’ on which meteorological observations were made across the world, 
they tried to raise their kites into the air as well. This international day had started as a structural 
project at the Milan conference of the International Commission for Scientific Aeronautics.120  

The map in the final travel report showed two things. It first showed the route that the 
Planet took, following the African coast, going south from Cape Town almost twenty degrees, 
then back north, over Madagascar and the Maldives to British Ceylon. From Ceylon they went to 
the Dutch Indies, south of Sumatra and Java, turning between Bali and Lombok towards the 

                                                             
117 Korvetten-Kapitän Lübbert, ed., Forschungsreise S. M. S. “Planet”1906/7 I. Reisebeschreibung (Berlin: Karl 
Siegismund, 1909), i–xviii. 
118 Hugo Hergesell et al., eds., Forschungsreise S.M.S. “Planet” 1906/7, II. Band Aerologie (Berlin: Karl 
Siegismund, 1909), 50–60. 
119 Köppen, “Wissenschaftliche Luftschiffahrt,” 108. 
120 Ibid., 3. 



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121 

Moluccas and the Bismarck Archipelago. From their German colony they went to the American 
Philippines and Hong Kong.  

Second, the map also showed the cities of the Eurasian continent that took part in the 
monthly ascents, with South Asia and Africa – except for Cairo – empty, and an impressive 
string of Russian cities from St. Petersburg to Omsk. West of this string there were almost thirty 
stations, mostly in Germany, Russian Poland and the Alps, and interestingly, Great Britain, 
which had suddenly caught up with the other great powers in aerological soundings. By pairing 
the strings of European land observatories to the route of the Planet, the goal of the map was to 
demonstrate the pioneering mission of the Planet and the ‘blank spot’ it had to fill; the tropical 
atmosphere that hung above the maritime and land economies of Asia. While imperial powers 
competed in getting political and economic access or even hegemony in these economies, the 
German meteorologists contributed to opening up the tropical skies.121 

From this first trip, Köppen drew two general conclusions from the data: first, above the 
oceans, just as on the land, the atmosphere changed from one mächtige (mighty) layer to another, 
from one where the temperature dropped at higher altitudes to one where it rose (a so-called 
‘inversion’), or one where it stayed constant (a so-called ‘isotherm’). Second, the atmosphere 
above the inversion layers above the sea were normally as dry as the atmosphere at the 
immediate surface of deserts – a phenomenon only known from winters in moderate zones, 
whereas Köppen expected the conditions in the tropics to be more like the summers in Europe. 
This begged for more measuring. 

All in all, the Planet was a first act in tropical aerology. It was a pilot. Other Europeans 
would take it up, among them the Dutch meteorologist Willem van Bemmelen, who started 
soundings with manned and unmanned balloons in Batavia from 1910 onwards. Van Bemmelen 
had already visited Strasburg. Outside Europe, the first colonial bureaucrats started to take over 
from the occasional visiting ship.122 In Germany, Köppen continued working on kites until 1913, 
when the kite station burned down and the First World War broke out. This was the end of the 
German imperial dream, at least for Köppen. In 1919, a year after the fall of the Empire, Köppen 
retired, and in 1924 he moved to Austrian Graz to live with his daughter and son-in-law. Alfred 
Wegener had a position as meteorologist and geophysicist at the university there, and Köppen 
continued cooperating with Wegener on his theory of continental movement and 
paleoclimatology. Köppen would keep publishing works in ‘dynamical climatology’ until 1940, 
when he died of old age in the first year of the Second World War. 

                                                             
121 During the journey, the members of the Planet observed the power struggles of other colonial nations: in the 
harbor of Batavia, for example, they encountered only one Dutch warship, and found out that all other warships 
were sent to Lombok and Bali to wage a colonial war against the Rajah of Bali, which ended with a ritual suicide, 
puputan, or in the words of the German officers, a ‘heroic fight to the death’ of the Rajah of Denpasar and many 
hundreds of his followers mown down by Dutch gunfire. Ibid., 67–70. 
122 Mahony, “For an Empire of ‘all Types of Climate’: Meteorology as an Imperial Science.” 



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122 

Conclusion 

This article has demonstrated the role of Germany and the German-speaking world in the 
imperial construction of global aerology, and especially the role of Wladimir Köppen and his 
kite work at the Deutsche Seewarte, working closely together with German-speaking 
meteorologists such as Wind, Hann, Von Bezold and Hergesell. Köppen was a ‘Baltic German’ 
migrant in Germany operating in a world of competing empires. Both land empires such as 
Russia and Austria-Hungary and maritime empires such as Great Britain, France and the 
Netherlands had created a stage for global meteorology, in which a race was imagined between 
imperial science programs. Germany played the role of global middle man, concurrently a 
continental empire and an aspiring maritime empire.  

It is important that the social and imperial history of the German scientist does not focus 
on the German state alone, but focuses on the German-speaking community as a transnational 
scientific force of science and state formation. German scientists had created a niche for 
themselves in the nineteenth century (and even before), as civil servants in an emerging world of 
high imperialism, competing for ascendancy in the technosphere, with the ‘free atmosphere’ as a 
trans-imperial space.  

The problematic figure of the German apolitical opportunistic migrant-scientist, selling 
their work to different governments and political regimes, each with their own imperial 
ambitions, was made famous as a trope by the Cold War Hollywood blockbuster The Right Stuff, 
directed by Philip Kaufman in 1983. This movie was an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s 1979 novel 
of the same name dealing with the American-Russian space race in the 1950s.123 When in one of 
the movie’s scenes senator Lyndon B. Johnson complains about the Germans helping the Soviets 
building satellites, gaining ‘the high ground’, and surpassing the Roman and British Empires 
with their roads and ships, but most of all the Americans with their air planes, a fictional version 
of Wernher von Braun, the German architect of the American space program, steps forward and 
replies to the senator with a heavy accent: ‘no, […] our Germans are better than their Germans’.124  

Just like all other scientists, German meteorologists were very political and not just 
opportunistic: many of them invested a lot in empire-making. However, these empires were 
often, but not always, organized around the specific nation-state of Germany: more important 
‘empires’ formed the wider German academic community and the global community of 
meteorology. For these two communities they were willing to strategize, whether that meant 
organizing kite stations or mounting large expeditions to the South Seas.  
                                                             
123 See also: Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (London: Vintage Books, 2005 [1979]). 
124 This quote may reflect a historical anecdote. Andrew Roberts wrote that Ian Jacob, Churchill’s military assistant 
in the British War cabinet had said something similar once to him in person on Britain winning the war because of 
‘their Germans’ being better. However, Jacob made the remark decades after the War and it is unclear whether it 
was Jacob or Kaufman who came up with this. See also Andrew Roberts, A history of the English-Speaking Peoples 
since 1900 (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 



History of Meteorology 8 (2017) 
 

 
 
 

 
 

123 

The story of meteorology around 1900 was one of a global alliance of Germans working 
for and moving between different governments and science institutes: a history of cooperating 
Germanophones. After 1871, Bismarck’s German Empire would indeed form a new beacon for 
German-speaking scientists, and its government a very interesting new supplier of science jobs. 
Imperial Germany needed all kinds of German-speaking scientists for its new project of empire-
building, at first in Europe and later in Africa and Melanesia too. Köppen himself was drawn to a 
government position in Hamburg. His family had worked for the Russian Empire, he had been 
educated in German universities and he had worked together with Swiss and Austrian 
meteorologists, both in Russia and in Germany. He was an ideal candidate to work for the 
Seewarte and expand Germany’s meteorology.  

With the balance of power in Europe shifting, Germany was able to take the lead in the 
build-up of global aerology, in a period in which a German-Austrian-Russian entente and a 
German-French rapprochement under the leadership of Bismarck created opportunities for 
international cooperation that were not directly abandoned when these relationships became 
strained again, at least not in the years before the Great War. And at sea the Germans cooperated 
with the Dutch and the Danish. It was a golden age for German aerology: in the years that 
Bismarckian Realpolitik gave way to Wilhelmian Weltpolitik, partly thanks to Köppen German 
aerology became even transcontinental, resulting in a global scramble for the ‘free atmosphere’.  

 

Acknowledgements: 

This research was made possible by two fellowships in 2015: the Scholar-in-Residence Program 
from the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Herzog Ernst Stipend from Erfurt University’s 
Research Library at Gotha. It also benefited from research done while appointed at the History of 
Science Chair, which forms part of the Historisches Seminar at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-
Universität during 2016-2017. I wish to thank Cornelia Lüdecke and the anonymous referees for 
their very valuable comments and suggestions and Franziska Hupfer and Boris Buzek for 
inviting me to discuss and present my ideas to the Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens (ETH / 
University of Zürich) in 2016.  


