-
Galileo Galilei
Developed the suction pump. He used air to draw underground water up a column but found there was a limit to what height the water could be raised. He was born February 15th, 1564 and died January 8th, 1642. -
Evangelista Torricelli
He developed the first barometer. To do this he inverted a closed end tube filled with mercury into a pan of mercury. (He tried with water first but it did not work.) His idea was the height of mercury in the tube is equal to the atmospheric pressure. He found that the atmospheric pressure was 760mm. The space that was left at the top of the 1m long tube is called a vacuum. He was born October 15, 1608 and died October 25, 1647. -
Otto von Guericke
He made a pump that could create a very strong vacuum that many things could not pull the two metal hemispheres apart. He reasoned that the hemispheres were held together by the mechanical force of the atmospheric pressure rather than the vauum. (Also explained by putting two plungers together.) He worked on this experiment from 1643 to 1645. He was born November 30, 1602 and died May 21, 1686. -
Christian Huygens
He developed the manometer. He did this so he could study the elastic forces in gases. Also, he developed some of the first practical vacuum pumps. He was born April 14, 1629 and died July 8, 1695. -
Blaise Pascal
He used Torricelli's baromter creation and travelled up and down a mountain with it in France. He found out that as he moved down the mountain the atmospheric pressure increased. Thus, as he moved up the mountain, the atmospheric pressure decreased. The SI unit of pressure, Pascal, is named after him. He was born June 19, 1623 and died August 19, 1662. -
John Dalton
Just before publishing the atomic theory, he concluded that in a mixture of gases that the total pressure is equal to the sum of the pressure of each gas. That is, if it were in a container alone. The presssure that each gas exerts is called partial pressure. This became known as Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures.(AKA - the total pressure of gases in a container is the sum of the pressure of each gas. He was born September 6, 1766 and died July 27, 1844. -
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
He observed the law of combining volumes.
For example: Two volumes of hyrdrogen combined with one volume of oxygen formed two volumes of water. He was born December 6, 1778 and died May 9, 1850. -
Amadeo Avogardo
He took many years of studying the work of others and after published Avogardro's Hypothesis in 1811. This hypothesis stated that a sample of any gas at the same temperature and preesure will contain the same number of particles. It also suggested that the more gas particles, the greater the pressure. Thus, the fewer the gas particles, the lower the pressure. He did not do his own experiments and therefore was ignored for many years. He was born August 9, 1776 and died July 9, 1856.
