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Period: Jan 1, 1564 to
Development of the Measurement
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Galileo
Galileo created a device that was used to pump water from rivers for varies uses, one being irrigation of the land. The pump was similar to how a syringe draws the water up from the ground. He found that 10 meter was the limit where water would rise in the suction pump, but he was confused to why there was a limit. -
Otto von Guericke
Otto von Guericke was more on his own for his contribution to the the measurement pressure. He had created a pump that created a extremely strong vacum, note that it was so strong a team of sixteen horses could not pull the two metal hemipheres apart. He spent two years working on this. Guericke's theory of why the two hemispheres would not come apart was because of the force of the atmospheric pressure, not the vacuum. -
Evangelist Torricelli
Torricelli was an Italin physicisst, who continued on with the work of Galileo. He determined the limit to which the height of water the pump could pump was because of atmospheric pressure. A barometer is a glass tube standing in a bath of mercury. Air pressure pushes down on the surface of the mercury, making some rise up the tube. The greater air pressure, the higher the mercury rises. -
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was a very famous man who did many things to contrbute to this world. Two of his main discoveris were he experimented with atmospheric pressure, discovering that vacuums exist in the real world. Pascal also used the creation from Torricelli, his barometer when he took an adventure up a mountain in Southern France. Noticing that the pressure of the atmosphere decreased as he travelled up the mountain and increased as he went down. The unit Pascal, for pressure came from him as well -
Christiaan Huygens
Christiaan was a contributor to what we know now but not as much as the other men. He created a manometer to study the elastic forces in gases. The definition of a manometer is: an instrument for measuring the pressure acting on a column of fluid, especially one with a U-shaped tube of liquid in which a difference in the pressures acting in the two arms of the tube causes the liquid to reach different heights in the two arms. -
John Dalton
John Dalton made multiple contrubutions to the field of chemistry. At the age of 35 in 1801, Dalton stated that in a mixture of gases, the total pressure is equal to the sum of the pressure of individual gas. The pressure that was exerted by each of these gas alone was also known as its partial pressure. -
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
Joseph has slightly different contribution to the measurement of pressure. Gases combine among themselves in very simple proportions. Today, Gay-Lussac's law is: The ratio of the volumes of gases consumed or produced in a chemical reaction is equal to the ratio of simple whole numbers. -
Amadeo Avagardro
Amadeo Avardro used Gay-Lussac's information from his experiments to hypothesized that two given samples of an ideal gas, of the same volume and at the same temperature and pressure, contain the same number of molecules.
