The dawn of meteorology

Abstract

Very little has been written in Spanish about the evolution of meteorology as a corpus of knowledge about the processes taking place „aloft“. Not even the few good historical surveys in other languages have found translators into Spanish. The father of meteorological historiography, Gustav Hellmann, among his many lasting contributions to the history of meteorology, published, first in English, then in German, an essay about how the wisdom of meteorological ideas evolved in the prescientific phase. We offer the Spanish-speaking reader a translation, with a few notes, of that classic essay on how meteorology came to be developed, from Babilonian times to the Scientific Revolution, when instruments were devised that allowed quantification of atmospheric processes.