On the history of the Secchi disc

Abstract

The first records on regular, tabulated, measurements of transparency of natural waters are those performed by the German naturalist Adelbert von Chamisso during the Russian “Rurik” Expedition 1815–1818 under the command of Otto von Kotzebue. A standardized method to determine the water clarity (transparency) was adopted at the end of the nineteenth century. This method (lowering a white painted disc into the water until it disappeared out of sight) was described by Pietro Angelo Secchi in Il Nuovo Cimento and was published in 1865. The Austrian scientist Josef Roman Lorenz von Liburnau, experimenting with submersible objects, like white discs, in the Gulf of Quarnero (Croatia) in the eighteen-fifties, well before Secchi started his investigations, questioned the naming of the white disc. However, the experiments performed by Secchi and Cialdi in 1864 on such an intensive scale were never performed before. At the beginning of the twentieth century, water transparency observations by means of a 30 cm white disc, was named the Secchi-disc method.

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