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Period: Jan 1, 1550 to
Timeline of the Measurement of Pressure
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Feb 15, 1564
Galileo Galilei
Born: February 15, 1564, Pisa
Died: January 8, 1642, Arcetri In 1630 (Age of 66), he developed the suction pump. He used air to draw underground water up a column, similar to how a syringe draws water. He was perplexed as to why there was a limit to the height water could be raised. -
Otto von Guericke
Born: November 20, 1602, Magdeburg
Died: May 11, 1686, Hamburg In 1643-1645 (Age of 41-43), he made a pump that could create a vacuum so strong that a team of 16 horses could not pull two metal hemispheres apart. He reasoned that the hemispheres were held together by the mechanical force of the atmospheric pressure rather than the vacuum. -
Evangelista Torricelli
Born: October 15, 1608, Faenza
Died: October 25, 1647, Florence In 1643 (Age of 35), he developed the first barometer. He carried on Galileo's work by determining that the limit to the height Galileo's pump could draw water was due to atmospheric pressure. He invented a closed-end tube filled with mercury that, in turn, was suspended in a shallow dish filled with liquid mercury. -
Blaise Pascal
Born: June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand
Died: August 19, 1662, Paris In 1648 (Age of 25), he used Torricelli's "barometer" and travelled up and down a mountain in southern France. He discovered that the pressure of the atmosphere increased as he moved down the mountain. Somtime later the SI unit of pressure, the Pascal, was named after him. -
Christiaan Huygens
Born: April 14, 1629, The Hague
Died: July 8, 1695, The Hague In 1661 (Age of 32), he developed the manometer to study the elastic forces in gases. -
John Dalton
Born: September 6, 1766, Cockermouth
Died: July 27, 1844, Manchester In 1801 (Age of 35), he stated that in a mixture of gases, the total pressure is equal to the sum of the pressure of each gas, as if it were in a container alone. The pressure exerted by each gas is called its partial pressure. -
Amedeo Avogadro
Born: August 9, 1776, Turin
Died: July 9, 1856, Turin In 1811 (Age of 35), he suggested, from Gay-Lussac's experiments conducted three years earlier, that the pressure on a container is directly proportional to the number of particles in that container (known as Avogadro's Hypothesis). This can be illustrated by blowing up a balloon, ball, or tire: the more air is added, the larger the container becomes due to increased pressure. -
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
Born: December 6, 1778, Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat
Died: May 9, 1850, Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat In 1808 (Age of 30), he observed the law of combining volumes. He noticed that, for example, two volumes of hydrogen combined with one volume of oxygen to form two volumes of water.
