Coriolis Effect - History

History

Italian scientists Giovanni Battista Riccioli and his assistant Francesco Maria Grimaldi described the effect in connection with artillery in the 1651 Almagestum Novum, writing that rotation of the Earth should cause a cannon ball fired to the north to deflect to the east. The effect was described in the tidal equations of Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1778.

Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis published a paper in 1835 on the energy yield of machines with rotating parts, such as waterwheels. That paper considered the supplementary forces that are detected in a rotating frame of reference. Coriolis divided these supplementary forces into two categories. The second category contained a force that arises from the cross product of the angular velocity of a coordinate system and the projection of a particle's velocity into a plane perpendicular to the system's axis of rotation. Coriolis referred to this force as the "compound centrifugal force" due to its analogies with the centrifugal force already considered in category one. By the early 20th century the effect was known as the "acceleration of Coriolis". By 1919 it was referred to as "Coriolis' force" and by 1920 as "Coriolis force".

In 1856, William Ferrel proposed the existence of a circulation cell in the mid-latitudes with air being deflected by the Coriolis force to create the prevailing westerly winds.

Understanding the kinematics of how exactly the rotation of the Earth affects airflow was partial at first. Late in the 19th century, the full extent of the large scale interaction of pressure gradient force and deflecting force that in the end causes air masses to move 'along' isobars was understood.