Rittner D. A to Z of Scientists in Weather and Climate

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with inventing the barometer and was the first to

create a vacuum.

Torricelli was one of three sons of Gaspare

Torricelli, a textile artisan of modest means who

sent his young son to his uncle, a Camaldolese

monk, for his education. He attended the Jesuit

College of Faenza in 1624, and in 1627, he trav-

eled to Rome to attend the Collegio Romano. He

was a good student and found himself being

taught by Antonio Benedetto Castelli, professor

of mathematics at the University of Sapienza,

Rome, and a good friend of Galileo

GALILEI

Castelli hired him as his secretary and substitute

teacher from 1626 to 1632, and from there to

1641, Torricelli appears to have worked for Mon-

signor Giovanni Ciampoli, another friend of

Galileo, and perhaps other professors.

In 1641, Galileo invited Torricelli to become

his literary assistant and secretary in Pian dei

Giullari, Florence, after reading Torricelli’s “Trat-

tato del Moto” (Treatise on Motion), his thesis

amplifying Galileo’s work on projectiles. Castelli

had sent it to him and recommended Torricelli.

Galileo, blind and ill at the time, posed the prob-

lem to Torricelli on how to make a vacuum that,

at the time, scientists could not believe existed.

On Galileo’s death on January 8, 1642, Tor-

ricelli was appointed mathematician to the grand

duke of Tuscany and Galileo’s successor as pro-

fessor of mathematics to the Florentine Academy

at the request of Ferdinando II dei Medici. With

a good salary and lodging in the Medici palace,

he began his work.

Pumpmakers of the grand duke had a prob-

lem trying to raise water to a height of 40 inches

or more and found that 32 feet was the upper

limit to which they could raise water in a suction

pump. Torricelli discovered that, because of

atmospheric pressure, water will not rise above

33 feet in a suction pump. In 1643, he experi-

mented by filling three-foot-long glass tubes with

mercury, covering one end, and inverted each

into an open bowl of mercury. He noticed that

the mercury did not completely empty the tube

and stayed in a column about 30 inches (76 cen-

timeters) high above the mercury in the bowl,

with an empty space above, although it varied

day by day. This vacuum is known as the Torri-

cellian vacuum.

In 1644, Torricelli presented a paper to

explain his tube experiments, his “argento vivo”

(mercury). In effect, he had discovered air pres-

sure and the creation of the barometer, a device

that measures air pressure. He explained the

results as the heavyweight effect of being at the

bottom of a sea of air, miles high, pressing down

on the mercury in the bowl, balancing the weight

of the mercury held up in the tube.

184 Torricelli, Evangelista

Evangelista Torricelli. Torricelli is best known as the

inventor of the barometer. (Courtesy of NOAA Image

Library)

Because no one had ever created a sustained

vacuum before the Torricellian vacuum, this find-

ing was an important scientific discovery. Torri-

celli also observed that light and magnetism were

conducted through the vacuum as well as through

the atmosphere. However, he stayed away from

the vacuum debate. Further experiments on

whether animals could survive in a vacuum failed.

It was several years before the scientific commu-

nity finally accepted Torricelli’s vacuum, based on

experiments by later scientists, especially Robert

Boyle. His work inspired other scientists, such as

French mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pas-

cal. He used a Torricellian tube and determined

that thinner air at a high altitude has a lower air

pressure, he also saw that a drop in air pressure

often precedes rain or snow. Torricelli’s experi-

ments also were instrumental in German physicist

Otto von Guericke’s success in making a practical

air pump.

Torricelli’s discovery that water will not rise

above 33 feet in a suction pump because of atmo-

spheric pressure gives him the honor of being the

father of the principles of hydromechanics.

Although he is best known for being the inventor

of the barometer (the word coined by Boyle in

1665, not by Torricelli), he worked on a variety of

projects in math, fluids, and motion. He improved

both telescopes and microscopes, being an excel-

lent lens grinder, and published a number of

papers in mathematics. In 1644, he published

Geometric Works, which described his conclusions

on the motion of fluids and projectiles. One of the

units used to measure pressur

e, a torr, is named in

honor of Torricelli. He died young, at age 31, from

an unknown illness.

Torricelli, Evangelista 185

5 Uman, Martin A.

(1936– )

American

Electrical Engineer, Physicist

Martin Uman was born on July 3, 1936, in

ampa, Florida, to Morrice and Edith Uman,

both attorneys. As a youth, Uman’s interests were

in tennis while he attended Gorrie Elementary,

Woodrow Wilson Junior High, and H. B. Plant

High School, all in Tampa. Uman received his

bachelor’s degree (1957), master’s degree (1959),

and Ph.D. (1961) in electrical engineering from

Princeton University.

Uman’s first position after graduate school

was associate professor of electrical engineering at

the University of Arizona, where he taught and

did research in electromagnetics and gaseous elec-

tronics. It was there that he first became inter-

ested in the physics of lightning. In 1965, he

joined the staff of the Westinghouse Research

Laboratories in Pittsburgh as a fellow physicist and

studied the physical and electromagnetic aspects

of lightning and long laboratory sparks. Uman

became a professor at the University of Florida in

1971. He has been director of the UF Lightning

Research Laboratory since 1972. He cofounded

and served as president of Lightning Location and

Protection, Inc. (LLP), from 1975 to 1983. LLP,

now a division of Global Atmospherics, is the

Martin A. Uman. Uman is generally acknowledged to

be one of the world’s leading authorities on lightning.

He is probably best known for his work in lightning

modeling: the application of electromagnetic field

theory to the description of various lightning processes.

(Courtesy of Martin A. Uman)

187

world leader in the sale of lightning locating

equipment. Since 1991, Uman has been professor

and chair of the department of electrical and com-

puter engineering at the University of Florida.

Uman is generally acknowledged to be one

of the world’s leading authorities on lightning. He

is probably best known for his work in lightning

modeling: the application of electromagnetic

field theory to the description of various light-

ning processes. That work, in addition to provid-

ing a better understanding of lightning in general,

has had a number of important practical applica-

tions and spin-offs, the most notable being the

LLP lightning locating system and the redefini-

tion of several important lightning characteristics

relative to hazard protection. Uman has pub-

lished three books on the subject of lightning,

with a fourth book now in press (coauthored with

Vladimir A.

RAKOV

), as well as a book on plasma

physics and 10 book chapters and encyclopedia

articles on lightning. He has also published more

than 150 papers in reviewed journals and more

than 160 in other articles and reports. He holds

five patents, four in the area of lightning detec-

tion and location.

Uman was the recipient of the 2001 Ameri-

can Geophysical Union John Adam Fleming

Medal for original research and technical leader-

ship in geomagnetism, atmospheric electricity,

space science, aeronomy, and related sciences for

“outstanding contribution to the description and

understanding of electricity and magnetism of the

earth and its atmosphere.” He was awarded the

Heinrich Hertz Medal in 1996 by the Institute of

Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for

“outstanding contributions to the understanding

of lightning electromagnetics and its application

to lightning detection and protection.” He was

named the Florida Scientist of the Year by the

Florida Academy of Sciences for 1990 and the

1988–89 University of Florida Teacher-Scholar of

the Year, the highest UF faculty award. He is a Fel-

low of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic

Engineers (IEEE), the American Geophysical

Union, and the American Meteorological Society.

Uman is currently working on lightning pro-

tection of power lines for Florida Power and Light,

lightning protection of aircraft for the Federal

Aviation Administration (FAA), and basic light-

ning physics for the National Science Foundation.

188 Uman, Martin A.

5 Vonnegut, Bernard

(1914–1997)

American

Chemist, Meteorologist

Bernard V

onnegut was born in Indianapolis,

Indiana, to Kurt Vonnegut, an architect, and

Edith (Lieber) Vonnegut. He grew up with his

brother, famed writer Kurt Vonnegut, and his sis-

ter Alice in Indianapolis. Vonnegut graduated

from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(MIT) in 1936 and continued at the school,

receiving his Ph.D. in physical chemistry three

years later. He worked for industrial laboratories

(Hartford Empire Co., 1939–41) and as a MIT

research associate (1941–45) before joining the

labs of General Electric in Schenectady, New

York, in 1945.

Vonnegut’s first year at GE found him

teamed up with Nobel Prize winner, Irving

LANG

MUIR

, and Vincent

SCHAEFER

in a project for the

U.S. Army Signal Corps, involving turning fog

and clouds into rain and clearing overcast skies.

Langmuir and Schaefer were working on aerosol-

related war research until 1943, when they

turned their attention to the investigation of the

properties of supercooled clouds as part of a study

of precipitation static.

Vonnegut worked under Langmuir at the

General Electric Company from 1945 to 1952.

While there, he improved a method that had

been pioneered by Schaefer, for artificially induc-

ing rainfall, known as cloud seeding by using sil-

ver iodide as a cloud-seeding agent. Schaefer

discovered in 1946 that a tiny grain of dry ice

produced millions of ice crystals when dropped

into a cloud of water droplets below the freezing

point. This experiment was created using a spe-

cial cloud chamber created by Schaefer called the

cold box, a GE home freezer with a black velvet

lining and a viewing light.

Vonnegut found that silver iodide had bet-

ter results in nucleating clouds than did dry ice.

On November 14, 1946, he deposited particles

of silver iodide in a refrigerated chest of super-

cooled, liquid water droplets. The result was the

formation of an abundance of ice crystals. No

other nucleating process has been found that

rivals the technique for making rain efficiently.

It is still the preferred method used by commer-

cial rainmakers to control drought in parts of the

western United States and in more than 60

countries around the world.

After GE’s legal department canceled further

studies in February 1947, the U.S. Army Signal

Corps, the Office of Naval Research, and the air

force took over the idea and created Project Cir-

rus to transform supercooled water droplets into

ice crystals, the main ingredient of cirrus clouds.

The project moved to New Mexico in 1948 with

189

Langmuir, Schaefer, and Vonnegut working

between there and Schenectady.

Vonnegut teamed up with Charles Moore,

who helped create the Irving Langmuir Labora-

tory in New Mexico, and continued his research

on thunderstorms and lightning. Vonnegut and

colleagues developed lightning-observation

equipment, produced controversial theories

about the property of lightning and rain, and per-

sonally trained several space-shuttle crews in how

to observe lightning while in space for scientific

purposes.

Vonnegut left GE in 1952 and moved on to

the A. D. Little Company, a scientific think tank

in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until 1967, when

he became professor of atmospheric science at

New York State University in Albany, New York.

He retired there in 1985, though he maintained

an office and a workspace to his last days.

While at Albany, he was a popular teacher,

earning the Distinguished Professor Award in

1983, which is the university’s highest honor. In

1996 he was given the Award for Outstanding

Contribution to Advancement of Applied

Meteorology by the American Meteorological

Society “for his pioneering discoveries of artifi-

cial techniques for nucleation of ice crystals

which have continued to provide the basis for

weather modification.” The following year, the

Weather Modification Association gave him the

Vincent J. Schaefer Award for “scientific and

technical discoveries that have constituted a

major contribution to the advancement of

weather modification.”

Vonnegut continued studying meteorological

phenomena, becoming an expert in such

phenomena as lightning bolts and their role in

precipitation and tornado formation, cloud elec-

trification, and the effects of updrafts/downdrafts

in thunderstorms. The holder of 28 patents, he

was also the author of more than 160 articles and

reports and contributed chapters to books and

encyclopedias.

Vonnegut died of cancer on April 25, 1997,

and is survived by his brother, esteemed novelist

Kurt Vonnegut, five sons, and five grandchil-

dren. His wife, Lois Bowler Vonnegut, died in

1972.

190 Vonnegut, Bernard

5 Wang, Daohong

(1964– )

Chinese

Physicist, Electrical Engineer

Daohong Wang was born in Hubei, China, the

son of middle-school teachers, Y

oufai Wang and

Tianzheng Shang. Wang spent his early years in

school in Hubei Province and on a farm and then

attended Hubei Teacher College, where he

received a bachelor of science degree in physics

in 1984. In 1987, he received a master’s degree in

atmospheric physics from the Chinese Academy

of Science, and in 1995, he earned a Ph.D. in

electrical engineering from Osaka University of

Japan.

After he received his master’s degree, he

began research work in Lanzhou Plateau Institute

of Atmospheric Physics, at the Chinese Academy

of Science. He worked there as an assistant

researcher for nearly four years. His focus was to

study the characteristics of plateau lightning, and

he successfully triggered positive polarity light-

ning (discharges lower positive charge to ground)

at the plateau area in the summer seasons.

Wang’s own research was on rocket-triggered

lightning, and he published his first paper, “The

criterion for propagation of the positive streamer

and its application,” in the Journal Acta Meteor-

ologica Sinica in 1989. His contribution in the

field was discovering electrical characteristics of

rocket-triggered lightning, lightning attachment

process, and leader pulse propagation character

istics. These discoveries have improved the

knowledge of lightning physics. Discovery of the

191

Daohong Wang. His contribution in the field was the

discovery of electrical characteristics of rocket-triggered

lightning, lightning attachment process, and leader

pulse propagation characteristics. These discoveries

have improved the knowledge of lightning physics.

(Courtesy of Daohong Wang)

lightning leader pulse characteristics was a major

accomplishment.

Wang received the Natural Science Award

from the Chinese Academy of Science in 1991

and a Japanese Notari Scholarship. He married

Dongxing Li in 1991 and they have one child. He

continues his work in the department of human

and information systems at Gifu University in

Japan. His present study is of the natural-light-

ning attachment process, which is very important

in lightning protection theory. He is also study-

ing lightning protection of new energy systems,

such as windmill generators and photovoltaic sys-

tems and looking at control issues of new energy

systems.

5 Wang, Mingxing

(1944– )

Chinese

Atmospheric scientist

Mingxing Wang was born in the Shandong Pro-

vince, China, on January 18, 1944, to Wang

Zhenli, a peasant, and mother Feng Guixiang.

The Shandong Province is located at the estuary

of the Yellow River and is China’s second-most-

populous province with 88.8 million people.

As a boy

, Wang went to school in his small

hometown village of Dalizhuang in Laixi, County

of Shandong, and had interests of becoming a

medical doctor or engineer. As a boy, he played

sports, especially table tennis, and played for his

school team (1956–62). He was also a member of

his university team at Shandong University

(1962–66), where he received a B.A. in physics

(1968). Before he moved on to graduate school,

he married Niu Xuhui in 1971. They have a son.

In 1977, he began studies at Oxford University in

the department of atmospheric physics (1977–78)

in an advanced study program under Sir John

Houghton.

Wang began his career as a researcher, con-

ducting laboratory experiments on the infrared

absorption of carbon dioxide for applications in

remote sounding of the atmosphere from satel-

lites. He also conducted field measurements of

aerosol composition in North China in coopera-

tion with. J. W. Winchester of Florida State Uni-

versity in 1980.

His first paper, in Chinese, entitled “Infrared

Absorption by the 15 Micron Meter Band of Car-

bon Dioxide,” was published in 1974 in the Chi-

nese Institute of Atmospheric Physics Annual Report,

published by Science Press Beijing. It was a sum-

mary repor

t on the laboratory experiments that

he conducted with Winchester in Florida.

Wang has made several important discover-

ies and observations in atmospheric science and

in particular on the issue of acid rain and for the

understanding of global warming, its causes, and

future trends.

He focused his study on the chemistry of

aerosols over remote areas and coal-fired cities in

China. He has studied in detail the bimode-size

distribution of the elements silicon (Si) and sul-

fur (S) in atmospheric aerosols over North China

and nonacid rain in relation to chlorine deficits

in atmospheric aerosols. This work is significant

for the study of formation and control of acid rain

and the study of heterogeneous atmospheric

chemistry.

Wang also developed time to the study of

methane emission from rice fields. He made sig-

nificant contributions in the knowledge of the

characteristics of the temperate and spatial vari-

ations of the emission rates and the controlling

factors and in the understanding of the mecha-

nism of methane formation in paddy soil and the

transport and oxidation of methane in rice

ecosystems. Among other new findings, he was

the first to discover and investigate the diel vari-

ation of methane emissions from rice fields,

which is caused by variations of the methane

transport efficiency from soil to the atmosphere,

not the variation of methane production in the

soil. Furthermore, he found total methane emis-

sions from Chinese and global rice fields that are

192 Wang, Mingxing

only 10 and 30 Tg per year respectively (1 Tg =

1 million tons), one-fourth of an early estimate

by other scientists that indicated that rice fields

were not an important source of atmospheric

methane. These findings are significant for the

study of the concentration increase trend of

atmospheric methane, which is an important

greenhouse gas, and for the mitigation option of

methane emission from rice fields.

He has been recognized for his work by receiv-

ing the China National Award for Advances in

Science and Technology and an award for natural

science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Wang has also published many papers and three

important books: Global Warming (1996), Atmo-

spheric Chemistry (1991), and Methane Emission

from Chinese Rice Field (2001). He currently is pro-

fessor of atmospheric chemistry at the Chinese

Academy of Sciences, Institute of Atmospheric

Physics (IAP), Beijing, where he currently is inves-

tigating biogenic (produced by living organisms or

biological processes) emissions in China. The IAP

is China’s highest academic organization in the

basic research of atmospheric sciences, and he has

served as its director from 1997 to 2001.

5 Wegener, Alfred Lothar

(1880–1930)

German

Geophysicist, Meteorologist,

Climatologist

Alfred Wegener was born in Berlin on November

1, 1880, the son of a minister who ran an orphan-

age, and obtained his doctorate in planetary

astronomy in 1904 at the University of Berlin. In

1905, W

egener took a job at the Royal Prussian

Aeronautical Observatory near Berlin, studying

the upper atmosphere with kites and balloons.

Wegener was an expert balloonist, as proved the

following year when he and his brother Kurt set

a world record of 52 hours straight in an interna-

tional balloon contest.

He was invited to go on an expedition to

Greenland as the official meteorologist, from 1906

to August 1908, under the leadership of Ludwig

Mylius Erichsen. The purpose of this “Denmark”

expedition of 28 men was to study polar air circu-

lation and to explore the northeast coast, among

other things. Wegener became the first to use kites

and tethered balloons to study the polar atmo-

sphere. However, Erichsen and two others (Jorgen

Bronland and Hoegh-Hagen) died on the trip.

Ironically, it would be Wegener’s fate more than 25

years later. Returning to Germany in 1909,

Wegener accepted a post as tutor at the University

of Marburg, taking time to visit Greenland again

in 1912–13. He taught at Marburg until 1919.

The idea that continents were connected

was not new. In 1858, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini

suggested that continents were linked during the

Pennsylvanian period some 325 million years ago

because certain Pennsylvanian plant fossils in

Europe and North America were similar. In 1885,

Australian geologist Edward Seuss saw similari-

ties between plant fossils from South America,

India, Australia, Africa, and Antarctica. He

coined the word Gondwanaland for this proposed

ncient supercontinent that was made up of these

five landmasses. Finally, in 1910, American

physicist Frank B. Taylor proposed the concept of

continental drift to explain formation of moun-

tain belts in a published paper, but it received no

reaction.

In 1911, Wegener collected his meteorology

lectures and published them as a book, The Ther-

modynamics of the Atmosphere, which became a

standard in Germany and garner

ed Wegener

much acclaim. While at Marburg, he noticed the

close fit between the coastlines of Africa and

South America. His formulation of his theory of

continental drift was the beginning of his search

for paleontological, climatological, and geologi-

cal evidence in support of his theory.

On January 6, 1912, at a meeting of the Geo-

logical Association in Frankfurt, he spoke about

his ideas of “continental displacement” (conti-

Wegener, Alfred Lothar 193