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A new work on the Eiffel Tower’s decades as a meteorological and geophysical station — equipped by the same Maison Richard whose instruments fill my collection.
A new work has been published on the site — The Tower as an Instrument: Meteorological and Geophysical Research on the Eiffel Tower (A Study). It is a detailed account of a little-known side of Paris’s most recognizable structure: from its very first years and for decades afterwards, its upper platform served as a working scientific station. At about 300 metres, pressure, temperature, humidity and wind were measured and sent by cable to recorders below; atmospheric-electricity experiments were carried out here; from here, in 1910, Theodor Wulf caught the first hint of what would become cosmic rays; and from here, later, came the first radio weather forecast in France.
The impulse for this work was my own collection. It holds some thirteen by — the very French maker whose instruments stood on the Tower. The set spans almost the whole history of the firm: from Félix Richard’s Bourdon barometers, through the recording barographs of Richard Frères, to the pocket barometers and recording altimeters of . Its jewel is a great rarity — a portable for balloonists, a sensitive differential barometer by which an aeronaut could detect the slightest change of altitude, whether the balloon had begun to rise or to sink.
When you handle these instruments yourself — cleaning a recording drum, straightening a Richard Frères pointer — you come to see that the station at the summit was, in effect, the largest installation this house ever assembled and set out under the open sky. It was exactly this coincidence — my instruments on my bench and the same instruments in the Paris sky of 1889 — that prompted me to look into the subject and write the study.
The work is available as a PDF, with illustrations from primary sources (including Eiffel’s own Travaux scientifiques, 1900) and an annotated bibliography.