Main Catalogue - VUOTOTECNICA - #6

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5 Otto von Guericke (1602 - 1686) Otto von Guericke, Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica De Vacuo Spatio, Amsterdam (1672) The experiment was carried out for the first time in 1648, according to the Galileian experimental method, by French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and it confirmed Torricelli’s intuition. During the same year, Pascal published a work on that topic confirming Torricelli’s experiment. The following year, the first outlines of the barometric law (variation of pressure with altitude) were laid as a proposition for measuring mountain heights. Around 1650, Otto von Guericke (1602–1686) invented the first vacuum pump, surpising everyone with his famous Magdebourg hemispheres experiment (1654), showing that two teams of horses could not separate two hemispheres of metal inside of which a vacuum was created. If it was the air pressure, exerted on the mercury contained in the basin, that held up that inside the glass tube, reducing the weight of the air above, then also the level of mercury inside the glass tube should have decreased. Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662) “Experiment in which Torricelli, its inventor, thinks that mercury, and any other liquid’s, ability to hold itself up in the void, may come from the natural external pressure of air“. Essays of natural experiments made in the Accademia del Cimento, Florence (1666) Tables on the effects of air pressure Blaise Pascal, Traitez de l’equilibre des liqueurs, et de la pesanteur de la masse de l’air, Paris(1663)