An Historical Perspective on Ozone Research: From 1840 to 1970 (Invited Presentation)

Ozone was discovered in the laboratory by Schoenbein (1839) at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Laboratory studies by de LaRive and Marignac in Geneva (1845), by Becquerel and Frémy in France (1852), by Andrews in the UK (1856), and by Soret in Basel (1868) led to the identification of the chemical nature of ozone. The concept of antozone was introduced and later abandoned. Starting in the 1870's ozone was believed to provide a powerful therapy against several diseases. His presence in the atmosphere was detected for the first time by Houzeau in Rouen, France, and Albert Levy conducted systematic ozone measurements from 1877 to 1907 at Parc Montsouris in Paris. Extensive laboratory work was performed to investigate the absorption properties of ozone (Cornu, 1879; Hartley, 1881; Huggins, 1890; Fowler and Strutt, 1917). In 1920 Fabry and Buisson used these results to design a spectrograph, which became a prototype for the spectrophotometer developed by Dobson in Oxford, UK and is still used to date to accurately measure the ozone column. The first attempt to measure the vertical profile of ozone were made by Goetz (Spitzbergen, 1929), by Erich and Victor Regener (Germany, 1934) and from the manned balloon launched in 1935 in South Dakota. Theoretical progress in the understanding of the production and destruction processes resulted from the work of Chapman (1929), Bates and Nicolet (1950) and Hampson (1965). Interestingly, before the discovery of the ozone destruction mechanisms by chlorine (Stolarski, Cicerone, Rowland and Molina (USA, 1974), the formation of an "ozone hole" by injecting bromine and chlorine catalysts by rockets was considered in the early 1960's as a military action against a potential rival nation.