The invention of atmosphere

• Snellius coined the term “atmosphere,” translating Stevin's Dutch neologism.
• The Jesuit mathematician Scheiner conceived of the atmosphere as being composed of atoms.
• Torricellian experiments offered a new understanding of the atmosphere.
• Gassendi argued that the atmosphere contradicted Aristotelian meteorological principles.
• Charleton, Boyle, Halley, and Hooke reformulated the size and composition of the atmosphere.

The word “atmosphere” was a neologism Willebrord Snellius created for his Latin translation of Simon Stevin's cosmographical writings. Astronomers and mathematical practitioners, such as Snellius and Christoph Scheiner, applying the techniques of Ibn Mu‘ādh and Witelo, were the first to use the term in their calculations of the height of vapors that cause twilight. Their understandings of the atmosphere diverged from Aristotelian divisions of the aerial region. From the early years of the seventeenth century, the term was often associated with atomism or corpuscular matter theory. The concept of the atmosphere changed dramatically with the advent of pneumatic experiments in the middle of the seventeenth century. Pierre Gassendi, Walter Charleton, and Robert Boyle transformed the atmosphere of the mathematicians giving it the characteristics of weight, specific gravity, and fluidity, while disputes about its extent and border remained unresolved.