Joseph Fourier’s Theory of Terrestrial Temperatures

Abstract

The concept of the greenhouse effect has yet to receive adequate historical attention. Although most writing ahout the subject is concerned with current scientific or policy issues, a small but growing fraction of the literature contains at least some historical material, which, as this chapter shows for the case of Joseph Fourier, is largely unreliable. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier is best known today for his Fourier series, a widely used mathematical technique in which complex functions can be represented by a series of sines and cosines. He is known among physicists and historians of physics for his book Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822), an elegant but not very precise work that Lord Kelvin described as “a great mathematical poem.” Most of his contemporaries knew him as an administrator, Egyptologist, and scientist. Fourier’s fortunes rose and fell with the political tides. He was a mathematics teacher, a secret policeman, a political prisoner (twice), governor of Egypt, prefect of Isère and Rhône, friend of Napoleon, baron, outcast, and perpetual member and secretary of the French Academy of Sciences. Most people writing on the history of the greenhouse effect merely cite in passing Fourier’s descriptive memoir of 1827 as the “first” to compare the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere to the action of glass in a greenhouse. There is usually no evidence that they have read Fourier’s original papers or manuscripts (in French) or have searched beyond the obvious secondary sources. Nor are most authors aware that Fourier’s paper, usually cited as 1827, was actually read to the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1824, published that same year in the Annales de Chimie et de Physique, and translated into English in the American Journal of Science in 1837! No one cites Fourier’s earlier references to greenhouses in his magnum opus of 1822 and in his earlier papers. Nor do they identify the subject of terrestrial temperatures as a key motivating factor in all of Fourier’s theoretical and experimental work on heat. Moreover, existing accounts assume far too much continuity in scientific understanding of the greenhouse effect from Fourier to today.