Hugo Hergesell

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Hugo Hergesell

Hugo Emil Hergesell (born May 29, 1859 in Bromberg ; † June 6, 1938 in Berlin ) was a German meteorologist and geophysicist . He is one of the founders of aerology as the branch of meteorology that deals with the study of the free atmosphere .

Life

Apprenticeship and first years of employment

Hugo Hergesell was the son of the railway accountant Wilhelm Hergesell and his wife Emma, ​​nee. Lankau. He studied mathematics, physics and geography at the Kaiser Wilhelm University of Strasbourg from 1878 to 1881 and then worked as a grammar school teacher at the Protestant grammar school in Strasbourg until his doctorate, which was suggested by Georg Gerland . Commissioned with the establishment of a meteorological observation network in Alsace-Lorraine , he quickly created a network of twelve meteorological stations and other precipitation measuring points. When the Alsace-Lorraine Meteorological Institute was established in 1891, Hergesell became its director.

Alsace-Lorraine State Meteorological Institute

Hergesell recognized early on that to understand the complex weather conditions, measured values ​​from higher air layers were needed. He therefore made contact with the Strasbourg airship department in order to obtain temperature and humidity data during free and tethered balloon ascents. In addition to the Prussian airship officer and specialist writer Hermann Moedebeck , Hergesell was prominently involved in the founding of the Upper Rhine Association for Airship Travel on July 24, 1896 in Strasbourg, following the example of the Berlin German Association for the Promotion of Airship Travel , which was used by meteorologists at this time Richard Assmann , Victor Kremser and Arthur Berson was dominated to be able to carry out scientific balloon flights.

In September 1896, at the general conference of the directors of meteorological institutes in Paris, he suggested that simultaneous international balloon ascents be carried out regularly to explore the atmosphere, as Assmann had already organized on a smaller scale in 1893 and 1894. The conference then appointed the International Commission for Scientific Aviation (later: International Aeronautical Commission ) and appointed Hergesell as its president. As early as November 14, 1896, he organized the first simultaneous ascent of manned and unmanned balloons in six European cities. He succeeded in creating a coordinated aerological measuring network with monthly simultaneous ascents. For the summer of 1907, with the involvement of the Imperial German and French navies, he organized sea-based soundings from Spitsbergen via Iceland and the Azores to the Canary Islands , supplemented by simultaneous measurements of the Italian Navy in the Mediterranean and the Russian in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea were. Hergesell, who was soon called the "back and forth" because of his hard work, held the position of Commission President until 1919 and again from 1927 to 1935. He was then appointed honorary president.

In 1904, Hergesell and Assmann founded the journal Contributions to the Physics of the Free Atmosphere with the subtitle "Journal for Research into the Upper Air". With an interruption from 1946 to 1956, it was published until 1999.

From 1904 to 1909, Hergesell undertook kite and balloon soundings in the Mediterranean Sea and in the trade area of the Atlantic Ocean from his yacht Princesse Alice with the support of the Prince of Monaco . He was able to show that the inversion layer found by Léon-Philippe Teisserenc de Bort and Richard Assmann in 1902 over the European continent also exists over the ocean. From 1906 he continued his expedition activity with the Prince of Monaco in the arctic waters near Spitzbergen.

Hergesell maintained close friendly contacts with Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin , whom he advised on meteorological issues for many years. As early as 1900 he carried out climbs of weather kites on Lake Constance on board Zeppelin's air screw boat Württemberg , which continued in 1902 and 1903 and from 1908 with the dragon boat Gna . Hergesell took part as a passenger on the famous “Swiss Voyage” of the LZ 4 airship on July 1, 1908. As early as 1907 he recognized the scientific value of geographical research from the airship and was supported in this by Fridtjof Nansen . In 1910, Hergesell accompanied Zeppelin on his study trip to Spitzbergen, the aim of which was to examine the possibility of using an airship in the Arctic.

In order to ensure the continuous continuation of his explorations carried out from ships, Hergesell set up several ground-based observatories. In 1908 the meteorological kite station was built in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, and in 1909 a mountain observatory at an altitude of 2200 meters on Tenerife . In 1911, at his suggestion, the first German research station was set up on Svalbard at the Advent Bay. A year later he founded the Ebeltofthafen Geophysical Observatory on the Crossbai, which was in operation until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Lindenberg Aeronautical Observatory

historic winch house for kite ascents in Lindenberg

On April 1, 1914, Hergesell succeeded Assmann as head of the Lindenberg Aeronautical Observatory near Berlin. After the outbreak of the First World War, it was fully used by the military. Hergesell himself was the head of the military meteorological service in the main headquarters and set up the weather observation stations on all fronts. In 1915 he traveled to Constantinople with Ludwig Weickmann to help Turkey set up its first weather service. Even under the difficult conditions of the war it was possible to secure the regular promotion service in Lindenberg. After the end of the war, work at the Aeronautical Observatory under Hergesell's direction took off rapidly. The kite soundings have also been fully resumed. On August 1, 1919, a team of eight kites was brought to the record height of 9750 meters, which is still valid today.

Hergesell recognized the potential of the aircraft as a means of transport for meteorological recording devices early on. As early as 1909 he had completed a flight in the Wright Model A with Orville Wright . In 1913 he had his colleague Kurt Wegener trained as a pilot. When Hergesell set up a scientific air base in Berlin-Adlershof in 1921 , he brought Wegener, who was meanwhile department head at the Deutsche Seewarte in Hamburg, to Berlin to manage it and to carry out weather flights himself . At the air station, which was relocated to Berlin-Staaken at the end of 1922 and to Berlin-Tempelhof in 1927 , 1283 flights for recording aerological measurement data took place until 1931. With a Junkers A 20 heights of up to 8,500 meters were reached.

When Friedrich Schmidt-Ott founded the Emergency Association of German Science in 1920 , Hergesell was elected to the 11-person main committee. In this position he sponsored numerous research projects such as the German Atlantic Expedition with the research ship Meteor from 1925 to 1927 and Alfred Wegener's Greenland expedition 1931/32. He also supported new research directions such as Ludwig Prandtl's atmospheric flow research and the investigation of the propagation of explosion waves in the ground and in the atmosphere by Emil Wiechert . Hergesell was curator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Flow Research and President of the Directors' Conference of the German Meteorological Institutes.

On March 31, 1932, Hergesell handed over the management of the observatory in Lindenberg to Heinrich von Ficker . In 1935 he handed over the presidency of the International Aeronautical Commission to Ludwig Weickmann. Hergesell died in Berlin on June 6, 1938. He is buried in the Lichterfelde park cemetery.

Private

Hergesell had been married to Emilie Hergesell (1871–1941), née Wenz, since 1894. There is a son from marriage.

power

Hergesell is one of the founders of aerology. As President of the International Commission for Scientific Aviation, he organized simultaneous soundings of the atmosphere, which can be seen as the forerunners of today's global measurement network. His expeditions to the trade winds and the Arctic contributed significantly to the understanding of the atmospheric events in these areas. In order to ensure permanent observation in these regions, he founded observatories on Tenerife and Spitsbergen.

Baro-Thermo-Hygrograph Hergesell-Bosch

Hergesell recognized the importance of precise measuring instruments for equipping weather balloons and kites. He himself made significant contributions to their development. Starting in 1896, for example, he constructed light aspirated baro-thermo-hygrographs for the simultaneous registration of air pressure , temperature and humidity for weather kites and for manned and unmanned balloons, which he manufactured in the precision mechanics workshop of J. & A. Bosch in Strasbourg let. In 1904 he developed the balloon tandem method especially for recording balloon probes over the sea, which drastically increased the chance of finding the recording device again and was quickly adopted by other aerologists.

As early as 1908, Hergesell made the first attempts to wirelessly transmit the measured values ​​from a recording balloon to a ground station, but failed due to the technical possibilities of the time. Under his directorate in Lindenberg, Paul Duckert (1900–1966) developed the first German radiosonde in the late 1920s , which on May 22, 1930 transmitted temperature measurements from heights of up to 15,120 meters to Earth. The name "radiosonde" goes back to Hergesell.

Hergesell was a supporter of aviation throughout his life. Even before 1900 he had supported Count Zeppelin's work as a meteorological advisor. As director of the Lindenberg observatory, he greatly expanded the aviation warning service that Aßmann had set up. From 1925 the high altitude weather service Lindenberg was broadcast every hour . Between 1926 and 1933, three 90 meter high transmission masts were erected for this purpose. The station reached all of Europe as early as 1927. Hergesell personally managed the aviation weather service until 1932.

Hergesell made significant contributions to the theory of the radiation equilibrium of the atmosphere and to the applicability of the basic hydrodynamic equations in meteorology.

Awards

Hugo Hergesell has received several awards for his services. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences awarded him the Buys Ballot Medal in 1913 , which is awarded only once per decade for outstanding achievements in the field of meteorology. In 1928 he received the Symons Medal of the Royal Meteorological Society , of which he was an honorary member. On October 3, 1929, the German Geophysical Society made him its first honorary member. On his 75th birthday in 1934 he was awarded the eagle shield of the German Empire .

On Spitsbergen the Hergesellbreen glacier and the Hergesellfjella mountain range are named after him.

Fonts (selection)

  • Hugo Hergesell: On the change in the equilibrium areas of the earth through the formation of polar ice masses and the fluctuations in the sea level caused by them , dissertation, Strasbourg 1887
  • Hugo Hergesell: Dragon Ascent on Lake Constance . In: Contributions to the physics of the free atmosphere 1, 1904, pp. 1–34
  • Hugo Hergesell: Dragon ascents on the Mediterranean Sea and on the Atlantic Ocean . In: Meteorologische Zeitschrift 22, 1905, pp. 277–279
  • Hugo Hergesell: Exploring the free atmosphere in the polar regions . In: Meteorologische Zeitschrift 24, 1907, pp. 566-567
  • Adolf Miethe and Hugo Hergesell (eds.): With Zeppelin to Spitzbergen . Bong, Berlin 1911
  • Hugo Hergesell: The scientific observatories on Tenerife and in Spitzbergen , In: Meteorologische Zeitschrift 28, 1911, pp. 566-568
  • Hugo Hergesell: The radiation of the atmosphere based on Lindenberger temperature and humidity measurements . In: The work of the Prussian Aeronautical Observatory 13, 1919.
  • Hugo Hergesell and Paul Duckert: Blasting for research purposes: results of the experiments carried out from April 1, 1923 to September 30, 1926 at various locations in Germany . Vieweg, Braunschweig 1927

literature

Web links

Commons : Hugo Hergesell  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hermann Moedebeck: The airship. Their past and their future, especially the airship in traffic and in war . Trübner, Strasbourg 1906, p. 35.
  2. ↑ Paul Schulze: Newer work in the field of aerology . In: Naturwissenschaftliche Wochenschrift NF Volume 7, 1908, pp. 289–292.
  3. ↑ Ludwig Weickmann: Hugo Hergesell . In: Meteorological Journal . Volume 55, 1938, pp. 233-237.
  4. ↑ Excerpt from a letter from Nansen to Hergesell dated October 16, 1909 in: Adolf Miethe, Hugo Hergesell (ed.): With Zeppelin to Spitzbergen . Bong, Berlin 1911, pp. 279-281.
  5. ↑ Jürgen Kocka , Wolfgang Neugebauer (ed.): The protocols of the Prussian State Ministry 1817–1934 / 38 . Volume 11 / II, arr. by Gerhard Schulze, Olms-Weidmann, Hildesheim 2002, p. 599, ISBN 3-487-11663-4 .
  6. ↑ Michael Börngen, Franz Jacobs, Ludwig A. Weickmann: Ludwig F. Weickmann (1882–1961) ( Memento from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Geophysikalische Gesellschaft 3, 2007, pp. 4–16 (PDF; 4.1 MB).
  7. ^ WK Adam, H. Dier: Long series of measurements for weather and climate research at the Lindenberg Meteorological Observatory . In: promet . Volume 31, No. 2-4, 2005, pp. 159-170 ( full text of the issue).
  8. ↑ Jochen Kirchhoff: Science Funding and Research Policy Priorities of the Emergency Community of German Science 1920–1932 . Dissertation, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, 2003.
  9. ↑ J. Neisser, H. Steinhagen: The history of the MOL 1905-2005 . In: promet . Volume 31, No. 2-4, 2005, pp. 82-144 ( full text of the issue).
  10. ↑ 1927 December 28 meeting of the British Astronomical Association . In: The Observatory 51, 1928, pp. 43-45 (English).
  11. ↑ Hergesellbreen . In: The Place Names of Svalbard (first edition 1942). Norsk Polarinstitutt , Oslo 2001, ISBN 82-90307-82-9 (English, Norwegian).
  12. ↑ Hergesellfjella . In: The Place Names of Svalbard (first edition 1942). Norsk Polarinstitutt , Oslo 2001, ISBN 82-90307-82-9 (English, Norwegian).
personal data
SURNAME Hergesell, Hugo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hergesell, Hugo Emil (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German meteorologist and geophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 29, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH Bromberg
DATE OF DEATH June 6, 1938
Place of death Berlin