The Coriolis Effect Further Described in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Claude Francis Milliet Dechales described the Coriolis effect in his 1674 Cursus seu Mundus Mathematicus. Dechales discussed and illustrated the deflection of both falling bodies and of projectiles launched toward the poles that should occur on a rotating Earth. Interestingly, this was done as an argument against the Earth's rotation, the deflections not having been observed at the time. Dechales's work follows on that of Giovanni Battista Riccioli, who had also described the effect in his Almagestum Novum of 1651.