The climate crisis is forcing us to look more closely: weather phenomena and climatic changes are now monitored using state-of-the-art satellites, computer models, and sensors. However, recording and understanding the climate has a long history that is characterized by technological innovations and geopolitical interests, as well as everyday ideas and knowledge about climate (and weather) that cannot be recorded using scientific methods alone. My research project aims to contribute to this long history by analysing the everyday understanding of climate in the period between 1850 and 1970—that is, before the emergence of political debates on climate change and environmental degradation in response to the 1972 Club of Rome report—using various examples from German-speaking countries.
The climate and weather are phenomena that affect our everyday lives. The weather determines what clothes we wear and how we plan our day, and even influences our mood. But while weather describes short-term fluctuations in the atmosphere, the climate is the sum of these fluctuations over long periods of time—and its effects are more profound. Climatic conditions shape entire ecosystems, agriculture, architecture, and even political decisions. In the nineteenth century, it was above all the idea of, fascination with, and fear of foreign climates that drove scientific, media, and popular debates on the subject. The dangers of tropical climates in particular became a defining topos in the course of colonialism, but the European climate and weather were also everyday topics of conversation, media coverage, and observation.1
And yet from a climatological perspective, it was not easy, at first, to define what climate actually was. Since ancient times, the earth had been divided into a cold, a temperate, and a hot zone, and in early forms of climate determinism these ideas were linked to the characteristics of the inhabitants of the various zones. Until the eighteenth century, the word ‘climate’ was used to refer to geographical locations. It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that a change began to take place. According to the historian Franz Mauelshagen, climate now became the ‘epitome of all the influences that determine the heat balance in a place’,2 and this development enabled the rise of climatology.3 Indeed, the study of climate in numerous scientific disciplines gained momentum in the course of the nineteenth century: geography and climatology, agricultural science, but above all medicine and engineering examined determining factors, and in some cases changes, in the climate, whether natural or technologically induced.
An important basis for scientific study of the climate was the collection of weather data. From the middle of the nineteenth century, an increasingly dense network of observation stations was established throughout Europe, and also rapidly in colonized areas outside Europe, to collect weather data—primarily temperature, air pressure, and precipitation.4 The institutionalization of weather observation stations was accompanied by a surge in the use of instruments, which affected not only meteorology but all sciences.5
The collection of meteorological data was therefore dependent on a whole range of instruments. The first liquid thermometer had already been constructed by Galileo in 1611/12 and had been continuously improved ever since.6 The expansion in research necessitated the invention of more and more instruments to record humidity, solar radiation, and even the sensible temperature. Inventing and continuously improving instruments ultimately became one of the most important concerns in the collection of weather data, guaranteeing ever greater precision and maximum comparability. This led to great frustration on the part of the meteorological authorities when it came to measuring stations outside Europe, where instruments often broke in transit and due to improper storage.7 The exhibition in the British National Meteorological Library in Exeter shows a variety of developments in the invention of instruments (see Fig. 1 above).
At meteorological observation stations in Europe as well as in colonized regions, instruments were usually housed in standardized ‘weather huts’ (Wetterhütten). The huts were, and still are, built in such a way that the instruments are protected from both precipitation and sunlight, and are well ventilated.
The standard equipment included a station thermometer, a minimum and a maximum thermometer, a psychrometer, and, if necessary, a thermo-hygrograph. There was also a barometer to measure air pressure for medical purposes, since contemporaries were especially interested in the influence of air pressure on body and mind. Special instructions were provided to ensure that the error-prone instruments were handled correctly, not least to guarantee the comparability of the data.8
The trade in meteorological instruments was international. Regular exhibitions of the latest climatological instruments were held by the British Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers, among other organizations. Thermometers, barometers, sunshine and light meters, radiation meters, hygrometers, and rain gauges were exhibited alongside models, maps, photographs, and diagrams from a wide range of international manufacturers.9 Instrument makers such as Wilhelm Lamprecht in Göttingen produced measuring devices in close cooperation with universities, but also served a broader market of citizens interested in meteorological data. Elaborately decorated thermometers, hygrometers, and barometers thus found their way into bourgeois parlours and living rooms. These instruments were sometimes customized to the specialized interests or tastes of the customers. Aneroid barometers that did not provide absolute readings, but instead allowed people to easily observe changes in air pressure, were advertised as an ‘ornament to any living room’.10 Eventually, citizens were able to read humidity levels using polymeters specially developed for domestic use.


On the one hand, the introduction of meteorological instruments into middle-class households reflected the bourgeois enthusiasm for science and natural history, which was also reflected in the existence of numerous scientific societies and clubs. On the other, it also illustrates a change in the understanding of weather and climate. ‘Practical instructions for predicting the weather’ were supposed to enable the ‘common man’ to anticipate changes in the weather with the aid of instruments; this was in explicit opposition to the centuries-old, experience-based knowledge of the weather cultivated primarily by farmers and sailors based on their observations of flora and fauna.10 Knowledge of the weather and climate propagated by folk sayings or Mauritius Knauer’s Hundertjähriger Kalender (both of which were widely published at the end of the nineteenth century11 ) was now to be consigned, once and for all, to the realm of the inaccurate, even superstitious, thanks to instrument-based observation by laypeople. Further factors in this process were the eventual appearance in public spaces of barometers and instruments for reading temperature and humidity—becoming focal points in town squares, for example—and the increasing publication of weather maps in newspapers, such as the evening edition of the Berliner Tageblatt, which published daily isobar maps.


This everyday preoccupation with the climate and weather, which were not always clearly separated, was embedded in technological and cultural developments. The increasing use of instruments for meteorological observations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only led to the professionalization of climate research, but also to an increasingly data-based understanding of weather and climate among the broader public. Traditional, experience-based knowledge was increasingly marginalized and replaced by an orientation towards data and instruments which still shapes our relationship to the climate and weather today.
This historical perspective sensitizes us to the challenges of today’s climate crisis by showing that our approach to the climate has not only scientific, but also cultural and political dimensions.
Feature Image/Fig. 1: Various thermometers in the library of the Exeter Met Office. Photo by Karolin Wetjen.
Translated by Marielle Sutherland and Jozef van der Voort at the GHIL
- Karolin Wetjen, ‘Die Zeiten des Klimas: Mediale Klimawandeldebatten im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 73/3 (2023), 291–307; Harriet Mercer and Thomas Simpson, ‘Imperialism, Colonialism, and Climate Change Science‘, WIREs Climate Change, 14 (2023), e851 at [https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.1851]. [↩]
- Franz Mauelshagen, ‘Ein neues Klima im 18. Jahrhundert, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 10/1 (2016), 39–57. [↩]
- Ibid., 50. [↩]
- James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York, 1998), 34–45. [↩]
- Kerby C. Alvarez, ‘Instrumentation and Institutionalization: Colonial Science and the Observatorio Meteorológico de Manila, 1865–1899’, Philippine Studies, 64/3–4 (2016), 385–416. [↩]
- For an overview of historical instruments used for weather and climate research, see G. Hellmann, Beiträge zur Erfindungsgeschichte meterologischer Instrumente (Berlin, 1920). [↩]
- Simon Schaffer, ‘Instruments and Ingenuity between India and Britain’, Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 140 (2019), 1–13. [↩]
- Carl Jelinek, Anleitung zur Anstellung meteorologischer Beobachtungen und Sammlung von Hilfstafeln, 2nd edn. (Vienna, 1876); London Meteorological Office, Hints to Meteorological Observers in Tropical Africa, with Instructions for Taking Observations and Notes on Methods of Recording Lake Levels: Published by the Authority of the Meteorological Council (London, 1902). [↩]
- G. J. Symons, John W. Tripe, and William Marriott, ‘Climatology: Thirteenth Annual Exhibition of Instruments’, Quarterly Journal of the Meteorological Society, 18/3 (1892), 191–200. [↩]
- H. Timm, Wie gestaltet sich das Wetter? Eine praktische Anleitung zur Vorherbestimmung der Witterung (Vienna, 1892), 34. [↩] [↩]
- See e.g. A. Schmauss, Wetterregeln, Landwirtschaftliche Merkblätter, 4 (Stuttgart, 1910). [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Karolin Wetjen (March 17, 2025). Collecting Weather Data: The Use of Scientific Instruments in Nineteenth-Century Climate Research. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved April 24, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13hna