Gas Properties

Since 1924, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has passed through 2.5 miles
of New York City once a year. More than three million people turn out to
enjoy the bands, the hundreds of clowns, and to see the huge balloons
floating above the parade. Styled after cartoon characters like Snoopy
(Figure 1), each massive, helium-filled balloon requires 90 people to carry it
safely through the parade passage.

At first glance, the helium gas inside these balloons appears to be quite
different from the air outside them. First, the balloons might be less impressive
if they were filled with air, instead of floating above the parade, they would
be pulled on the ground. Second, while everyone enjoying the parade must
breathe air to survive, they should only breathe helium if they want a more
squeaky voice. Even at a molecular level, air and helium are different: air is
a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and other gases, while helium is a single gas.
But helium and air have a lot in common with each other, and even with
substances like dangerous carbon monoxide and flammable hydrogen. At
standard temperature and standard pressure, these substances are all gases,
one of the common states of matter (see our States of Matter module for
more information). All gases share common physical properties. Like liquids,
gases move freely to fill the container they are in. But while liquids have a
definite volume, gases have neither a definite volume nor a definite shape.
And unlike solids, gases are highly compressible.
These common properties relate to a unique characteristic of gases: Gas
molecules are quite far apart and almost never interact with each other. In
solids, the forces of attraction and repulsion between molecules (the
intermolecular forces) are so strong that they lock the solid into a more fixed
shape and size, as discussed in our Solid Properties module. In liquids the
intermolecular forces are weaker and the liquid molecules can move more.
But the molecules of a liquid are still so close together that intermolecular
forces affect nearby molecules (see our Solid Properties module). Gas
molecules are so far apart that intermolecular forces are minimal.
Because gas molecules do not interact with each other, gases do not exist
as different types of liquids, and solids (such as molecular or lattice solids)
have properties that reflect the unique ways their molecules interact. As a
result, all gases share some common behaviors. We can understand how any
gas – be it helium or carbon monoxide – behaves by understanding the laws
that govern the behavior of that gas.
Gas laws
In the last four decades, scientists have carried out many experiments to
understand the common behaviors of gases. They have observed that the
physical condition of a gas (its state) depends on four variables: pressure (P),
volume (V), temperature (T), and amount (n, in moles): see our module The
Mol: Its History and Use for more information). The relationships between these
variables are known as gas laws, which describe our current knowledge of
how gases behave on a macroscopic level.

But the relationships behind the gas laws weren't obvious at first, they were
discovered by many scientists examining and testing their ideas about gases
over many years.
Gas pressure
We now understand that air is a gas made of physical molecules (for more
information, see our module (Atomic Theory). As these molecules move
within the container, they exert force – known as pressure – on the container
where they bounce off the barriers. Thank you To this behavior, we can inflate
car tires, floats, and balloons from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with
gases, but the idea that air is a substance made up of molecules that exert
pressure would have been a strange idea. before the 17th century. Along
with water, fire, and earth, air was considered a fundamental substance, and
not one that consisted of other things. For more information on this concept
see our module a href="/library/ module_viewer.php?mid=49">Subject:
Atoms. From Democritus to Dalton.)
However, in the year 1644, the Italian mathematician and physicist
Evangelista Torricelli proposed a strange idea. In a letter to a fellow
mathematician, Torricelli described how he had filled a long tube with
mercury. When he sealed one side and inverted the tube into another
container, only some mercury flowed into the container. The rest of the
mercury stayed in the tube, filling it to a height of approximately 29 inches or
73.6 centimeters . Torricelli proposed that it was the weight of the air that
pushed the mercury into the container and forced the liquid up the tube (this
was one of the first devices we called barometers).
Jesuit scientist Franciscus Linus had a different idea about what was keeping
the mercury in the tube. He proposed that the mercury was being pulled by
a “funicle” – an invisible substance that materializes to prevent a vacuum
from forming between the mercury and the sealed tube.

British scientist Robert Boyle disagreed, and came up with an idea to refute
Linus's idea of the funicle. Working with the English physicist Robert Hooke,
Boyle made a long glass tube that was shaped like a staff, and sealed the
shorter part of the staff. Laying the curve on the ground so that both sides of
the staff were up, Boyle poured in enough mercury so that the silvery liquid
filled the curve and rose to the same height on both sides. The air trapped
inside sealed the short leg.

British scientist Robert Boyle disagreed, and came up with an idea to refute
Linus's idea of the funicle. Working with the English physicist Robert Hooke,
Boyle made a long glass tube that was shaped like a staff, and sealed the
shorter part of the staff. Laying the curve on the ground so that both sides of
the staff were up, Boyle poured in enough mercury so that the silvery liquid
filled the curve and rose to the same height on both sides. The air trapped
inside sealed the short leg.

Boyle then poured mercury into the curved tube. He recorded the height of
the mercury column on the long side, and the height of the trapped air on
the shorter side. After repeating these steps many times. Boyle was able to
observe the relationship between the height of the trapped air (its volume)
and the height of the rising column of mercury (an indicator of the pressure
in the tube). Although scientists in Boyle's time did not generally graph data,
we can better see this relationship by plotting Boyle's data.

The characteristics of gases affect many important things, from Earth's

temperature to air pockets to how we breathe. Between breaths, the air
pressure inside our lungs is the same as the atmospheric pressure around us.
When we inhale and use our ribcage and diaphragm to expand the volume
of our lungs, the air pressure decreases and the external pressure forces air
into our lungs until the pressure is the same - thereby filling our lungs with the
oxygen that we need to survive.