18 Air Pressure

Torricelli filled a six-foot glass tube with liquid mercury and shoved a cork into the
open end. Then he inverted the tube and submerged the corked end in a tub of liquid mercury before he pulled out the stopper. As he expected, mercury flowed out of the tube and
into the tub. But not all of the mercury ran out.
Torricelli measured the height of the remaining mercury column30 inches, as expected. Still, Torricelli suspected that the mysterys true answer had something to do with
the vacuum he had created above his column of mercury.
The next day, with wind and a cold rain lashing at the windows, Torricelli repeated his
experiment, planning to study the vacuum above the mercury. However, on this day the
mercury column only rose to a height of 29 inches.
Torricelli was perplexed. He had expected the mercury to rise to the same height as
yesterday. What was different? Rain beat on the windows as Torricelli pondered this new
wrinkle.
What was different was the atmosphere, the weather. Torricellis mind latched onto a
revolutionary new idea. Air, itself, had weight. The real answer to the suction pump mystery lay not in the weight of the liquid, nor in the vacuum above it, but in the weight of the atmosphere pushing down around it.
Torricelli realized that the weight of the air in the atmosphere pushed down on the mercury in the tub. That pressure forced mercury up into the tube. The weight of the mercury in
the tube had to be exactly equal to the weight of the atmosphere pushing down on the mercury in the tub.
When the weight of the atmosphere changed, it would push down either a little bit
more or a little bit less on the mercury in the tub and drive the column of mercury in the tube
either a little higher or a little lower. Changing weather must change the weight of the atmosphere.
Torricelli had discovered atmospheric pressure and a way to measure and study it.
Fun Facts: Home barometers rarely drop more than 0.5 inch of mercury
as the weather changes from fair to stormy. The greatest pressure drop
ever recorded was 2.963 inches of mercury, measured inside a South Dakota tornado in June 2003.

More to Explore
Asimov, Isaac. Asimovs Chronology of Science and Discovery. New York: Harper &
Row, 1989.
Clark, Donald. Encyclopedia of Great Inventors and Discoveries. London: Marshall
Cavendish Books, 1991.
Haven, Kendall. Marvels of Science. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1994.
Macus, Rebecca. Galileo and Experimental Science. New York: Franklin Watts, 1991.
Middleton, W. E. The History of the Barometer. New Brunswick, NJ: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003.

Boyles Law
Year of Discovery: 1650
What Is It? The volume of a gas is inversely proportional to the force squeezing it.
Who Discovered It? Robert Boyle

Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?

The concept Robert Boyle discovered (now called Boyles Law) laid the foundation
for all quantitative study and chemical analysis of gasses. It was the first quantitative formula to describe the behavior of gasses. Boyles Law is so basic to understanding chemistry
that it is taught to every student in beginning chemistry classes.
A genius experimenter, Boyle also proved that gasses were made of atomsjust like
solids. But in a gas, the atoms are spread far apart and disconnected so that they can be
squeezed tighter. Through these experiments Boyle helped convince the scientific world
that atoms existedan issue still debated 2,000 years after their existence was first proposed by Democritus in 440 B.C.

How Was It Discovered?

Robert Boyle was the son of an earl and a member of the British Scientific Society.
During a 1662 society meeting, Robert Hooke read a paper describing a French experiment
on the springiness of air. The characteristics of air were of great interest to scientists in the
seventeenth century.
French scientists built a brass cylinder fitted tightly with a piston. Several men pushed
down hard on the piston, compressing the air trapped below. Then they let go. The piston
sprang back up, but not all the way back up. No matter how often the French tried this experiment, the piston never bounced all the way back up.
The French claimed this proved that air was not perfectly springy. Once compressed, it
stayed slightly compressed.
Robert Boyle claimed that the French experiment proved nothing. Their piston, he
said, was too tight to bounce all the way back up. Others argued that, if they made the piston
looser, air would leak around the edges and ruin the experiment.
Boyle promised to create a perfect piston that was neither too tight nor too loose. He
also claimed that his perfect piston would prove the French wrong.

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