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Jan 1, 1564
Galileo
Galileo was interested in ordinary water pumps and how they worked. From this he created a suction pump. This pump was used by drawing water out of the ground and up into a column. The piece of his experiment that had Galileo confused was that he couldn’t understand why there was limit to how high the water could be raised. -
Evangelist Torricelli
By continuing on with Galileo's work Evangelist Torricelli created the very first barometer. Torricelli determined the limit to the height that the water could go up the suction pump. The suction pump was able to draw water because of atmospheric pressure. Torricelli invented a closed tube with a pan full of mercury at the bottom. From this tube, the height of the mercury would equal the atmospheric pressure working -
Otto von Guericke
Guericke invented a pump that was made from a piston and an air gun cylinder with two-way flaps that were made to pull air out of a vessel that it was connected to. With this pump the suction was so strong that a team of sixteen horses couldn't break it appart. Guericke determind that the hemispheres were held together by the mechanical force of the atmospheric pressure. -
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal travelled up and down a mountain in southern France using a barometer to determine that the hydrostatic pressure depends on the elevation difference not the weight of the fluid. When he moved down the mountain the pressure of the atmosphere increased. Later on in life the SI unit of pressure (Pascal) was named after him. -
Christiaan Huygens
Christiaan Huygens studied the elastic forces in gases by developing the manometer. Huygens also developed one of the first vacuum pumps. -
John Dalton
John Dalton discovered that in a mixture of gases the total pressure is equal to the sum of the pressure of each gas. The pressure that each individual gas gives is called partial pressure. -
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac stated that if the mass and volume of a gas are kept at a constant then the gas pressure will increase linearly while the temperature rises. He observed the law of combining volumes. -
Amadeo Avagadro
From Gay-Lussac’s experiment Amadeo Avagadro stated that the pressure that is in a container is directly proportional to the number of particles that is in that container. The more air you add to an object the larger the container will become because of the increased pressure.
