The History of the Vacuum Pump*

By E. N. DA C. A N D R A D E
Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, United Kingdom

The first man to make a vacuum pump was Guericke, somewhere about 1654. It was a crude
pump, with joints kept airtight by water immersion. Soon after Boyle produced a much
improved piston pump, made by Robert Hooke. ,4bout the same time the Accademia del
Cimento used the vacuous space in the enlarged head o f a mercury barometer to carry out
experiments : this may be considered as a one-stroke mercury pump. Pumps on the Boyle
pattern were made by Huygens, Papin and Senguerd.
In 1682 Boyle described a two-cylinder pump, in which the pressure o f the atmosphere on one
piston did most o f the work required to raise the other. .4 much improved pump o f this type
was made by Haukesbee about 1705 and this remained essentially the pattern o f cylinder
vacuum pumps until the end o f the nineteenth century, when Fleuss introduced the cylinder
oil pump. For producing high vacua for the classic research on discharge in gases, pumps o f
the Geissler and Toepler type, based on continuous repetition o f Torricelli's experiment, were
used, which were extremely slow in action.
A new era was initiated in 1905, when Kaufmann introduced a continuously rotating mercury
pump, which was almost at once superseded by Gaede's much speedier rotary mercury pump.
Fore pumps o f box type, the prototypes o f which were water-pumps o f the sixteenth and
seventeenth century, were brought in by Gaede and others. In 1912 Gaede invented a pump
based on a fundamentally new principle, that a surface moving rapidly parallel to itself drags
with i t gas molecules. This so-called molecular pump produced extremely low pressures. The
last inventive step was also made by Gaede, when in 1915 he utilized the carrying along o f gas
molecules by a jet o f mercury vapour to effect a high vacuum. These vapour-stream pumps,
oil and mercury, have been developed on an enormous scale o f recent years.

THE first vacuum pump, in the sense of a machine by which
air could be progressively removed from a closed vessel,
was undoubtedly that invented by Otto von Guericke
somewhere about 1650, but before that, in 1644, Evangelista
Torricelli had carried out his famous experiment with the
barometer tubes, showing that the mercury stood at the same
height whether the upper end of the tube had the ordinary
form or was blown out to a sphere. From this, he correctly
concluded that the space above the mercury was empty.
This method was some 20 years later used to produce a
vacuous space for experiment, as shown in Fig. 1, which is
taken from the Saggi di Naturali Esperienzi, published by
the Accademia del Cimento in 1667. In (a) a small ball of
bitumen is being heated by sunlight concentrated by a
concave mirror, to show that smoke falls in vacuo ; in (b)
where the evacuated space is closed by a glass lid, another
innovation, it is shown that a tied lamb's bladder, containing
a trace of air, swells out to a sphere in vacuo. This method
which, comparing it with the mercury pumps of the nineteenth
century, may be called a one-stroke mercury pump, was used
in 1786 by Rumford to create a vacuum for investigating
" the propagation of heat in various substances." He
specified that the mercury had been previously freed of air
and moisture by boiling. Properly handled, the method is
clearly capable of giving a much better vacuum than the
early cylinder pumps, with water-saturated washers and such
like, but it is not easy to evacuate large spaces by this means,
and the space must not contain constructions of metals or
other substances either fragile or attacked by mercury.
Guericke's pump was first described in Kaspar Schott's
Mechanica Hydraulica-Pneumatica, 1657, as figured in Fig. 2.
It consisted simply of a cylindrical tube with two valves one
at H, halfway along it, which opened outwards to the
atmosphere under internal pressure and one a t / , the lower
end of the cylinder, opening when the piston was withdrawn
and closing when it was returned. This is dearly not good
design, even if the valves were effficient--and we are not
told how they were made. A tap E could be used to shut
off the evacuated vessel, which could then be removed, as
shown in the background. Water was freely used to make
the joints air-tight.
Guericke himself first published an account of his work
much later, in 1672, in his famous book Experimenta Nova
(ut voeantur) Magdeburgica de Vacuo Spatio (The New,
commonly called Magdeburg, experiments on Empty Space)
generally referred to as De Vacuo Spatio. The pump figured

* Paper presented at the First International Congress on Vacuum Techniques, Namur, 10-13 June 1958.
41
42 E. N. DA C. ANDRADE

there (Fig. 3) is of much better design and probably much

later construction than that figured by Schott. The essential
D
cylinder, gh, was supported by a tripod : it is shown separately
in "Fig. III". The piston running in this cylinder was of
wood, made air-tight with wet string. For use in the early
stages of pumping, a leather valve, z, closed by a spring, was
provided. When the pressure of the air to be expelled became
too low to force it open, use was made of the peg, m, taken
¢
out by hand during the upstroke and replaced during the
downstroke. Essential was the tap, gr, used as in Boyle's
pump, to be next described. It must be remembered that
the account of Boyle's pump appeared in a Latin edition in
1661, 11 years before De Vacuo Spatio and that Guericke
may well have seen it. The conical vessel, x x , at the upper
end of the cylinder and that shown in "Fig. VI", designed
to be hung so as to enclose the lower end of the cylinder,
were to be filled with water, which was relied on to make
the joints air-tight. The spherical glass receiver L was
cemented to the brass attachment carrying the tap. The
famous Magdeburg experiment with the two hemispheres
enclosing an exhausted space, which two teams of horses
could not pull apart, was carried out in 1654, probably with
the type of pump figured by Schott.
Robert Boyle's pump, of which he published an account,
with the illustration reproduced in Fig. 4, in 1660, was actually
made by Robert Hooke, which accounts for the excellent
design and workmanship, evidenced by the fact that there
was no need of water to keep the joints tight. In the vertical
brass cylinder ran a "sucker", " 4 4" in the diagram, which

FIG. 1(a) & (b). The vacuum experimentsof the Accademiadel Cimento.

FIG. 2. Schott's representation of Guericke's early pump. FIG. 3. Guericke's pump, from De Vacuo Spatio.
 The History of the Vacuum Pump
was presumably of wood, since a disc of oiled leather was
nailed to it, for air-tightness. This was driven up and down
by a rack and pinion. Oil, or an emulsion of oil and water,
was put on the piston for easy running. The receiver was a
large glass sphere with an opening at the top, cemented into
which was a brass ring made to receive a brass cover, shown
in detail at the upper right-hand corner. All this bespeaks
excellent handicraft.
Essential for the working was the hole at the upper shoulder
of the piston, shown closed by a peg. To operate the pump,
the tap below the receiver was closed, the peg removed and
the piston run up, expelling the air. The peg was then
replaced, the tap opened and the piston withdrawn, sucking
air from the receiver. The tap was then closed, the peg
removed and the process repeated. This is how Guericke's
last pump operated. It is clear that this pump of Boyle's
was an excellent instrument, well adapted for experiment.
Boyle's second pump, described in a book published in
FIG. 4. Robert Boyle's first pump.
43
1669, is shown in Fig. 5. The single cylinder was of the type
of the first pump, the peg being on the end of the long stick
shown on the right of the rack : the whole was immersed in
water for air-tightness, no doubt because, Hooke being no
longer in Boyle's service, the workmanship was not up to
standard. Today it is hardly necessary to stress the impor-
tance of perfection of finish in a mechanical pump. The
advantageous new feature was the fiat plate to which the
bell-jar for experiment could be cemented, a feature antici-
pated in a pump made by Huygens, of which, however, he
published no account, so that possibly Boyle's innovation
was an independent one.
Just as Hooke had worked for Boyle, so Denis Papin,
also a genius, worked for Huygens and made, to Huygens'
design, a pump, similar in many respects to Boyle's first
pump, with a plate for the receiver, of which he published
an account in 1674. At the same time he described a pump
of his own design, shown in Fig. 6, remarkable for having a
two-way tap, G, drawn separately to the right. One
channel was an ordinary hole at right-angles to the axis of
the turning part, the other a groove along a a for communica-
tion with the air. The stirrup was another novel feature :
with these early pumps with wide cylinders it required
considerable force to overcome the atmospheric pressure.
This trouble was avoided by providing two cylinders, the
pressure of the atmosphere on one piston helping to withdraw
the other. The first such pump, illustrated in Fig. 7, was
described by Boyle in 1682, but he clearly stated that it was
the invention of Papin, who was working for him at the time.
FIG. 5. Boyle's second pump.
44 E. N. DA C. ANDRADE

FIG. 6. Papin's pump with two-way tap. FIG. 7. Boyle's two-cylinder pump.

FIG. 10. The Fleuss pump.

(Miiller-Pouillet : Lehrbuch der Physik,
FIG. 8. Francis Hauksbee's pump. FIG. 9. Bianchi pump. vol. 1, 1906, Fig. 514, Vieweg.)
 "Ihe History~of the Vacuum Pump
The pistons were coupled together by a cord passing over a
pulley wheel. A two-cylinder p u m p of m u c h better design
was produced by Francis Hauksbee and described in 1709.
His illustration, reproduced in Fig. 8, corresponds exactly
to a p u m p still in the possession of the R o y a l Society. The
two pistons are worked by rack and pinion, so arranged that
as one descends the other ascends. The valves were m a d e of
bladder. The arrangement of the bell-jar, with a mercury
column m a n o m e t e r directly beneath it, was a very convenient
one. This pump, when put in order some years ago according
to Hauksbee's description, gave a v a c u u m within about
1 in. of mercury of perfect, better than which, as wet leather
was used for certain washers, could not be expected.
Hauksbee's design remained, in principle, unchanged until
well on in the nineteenth century : in fact, pumps of this type,
with small modifications and improvements, were still being
m a d e at the end of that century. In 1856, Bianchi introduced
a p u m p with a single cylinder, Fig. 9, so designed that the
air f r o m the receiver was drawn in alternately above and
below the piston as it played in the cylinder, with the effect
that, as far as the mechanical w o r k was concerned, the
pressure difference in both up and down stroke was neg-
ligible. This p u m p does not seem to have c o m e into general
use, perhaps on account of difficulties of construction.
FiG. 11. T6pler pump, as used towards the end of the nineteenth
century. (Mfiller-Pouillet ;Lehrbach der Physik, vol. 1, 1906, Fig. 527.)
45
A substantial improvement in the v a c u u m produced by
cylinder pumps was m a d e by Fleuss in 1892 with what he
called the G e r y k pump, in h o n o u r of the Magdeburg pioneer.
The new feature was that the dead space which is still left
when the piston has advanced to the end o f the cylinder
was filled with oil, whence these pumps were sometimes
called oil pumps. As shown in Fig. 10, halfway up the
cylinder there is a partition, supporting a spring-controlled
valve through which the piston-rod passes. Oil is contained
above this and above the piston. A t the end of its upward
stroke, the piston, with its superincumbent oil and air, lifts
the valve and forces out the air. The valve does not close
until the piston has descended a short distance, which ensures
a correct distribution of the oil. A special oil, of low vapour
pressure, although not as good as the m o d e r n apiezon oils,
was used and it is claimed that pressures as low as 0.0002 m m
mercury were attained. In any case, these pumps were at
one time widely used in the electric lamp industry.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, when high v a c u a - -
which in those times might m e a n a few times 10 -3 m m of
m e r c u r y - - w e r e required for electrical discharge tubes, the
mercury p u m p began to be developed. That used by Geissler
in 1855, said to be a modification of one devised in principle
by Swedenborg, was the first of a large class. It consisted
of a bulb connected by a flexible tube to an open reservoir
of mercury, this bulb being provided with a two-way tap by
means of which it could be connected either to the outside
air or to the vessel to be exhausted. The tap being turned
so as to give passage to the air and to cut off the vessel, the
reservoir was raised until all the air had been expelled from
the bulb : the tap was then turned so as to cut off passage
to be ~-
h ii
--T- - - -
4
FIG. 12. Improved form of T6pler pump. (Dunoyer; Vacuum
Practice. G. Bell, 1926, Fig. 1.)
46 E . N . DA C. ANDRADE
to the air and to connect to the vessel and the reservoir
lowered. The process was repeated as often as desired. The
vessel was thus effectively connected to a Torricellian vacuum
at each stroke, the fraction of air removed depending upon
the relative volume of bulb and vessel to be exhausted.
A great improvement was effected in 1862 by T6pler, who
retained the mercury reservoir and flexible tube but sub-
stituted for the tap an arrangement of tubes by which passage
was made for the air to be expelled, and the vessel to be
exhausted was connected to the Torricellian vacuum, auto-
matically at the appropriate position of the mercury level.
This went through improvements at the hands of Neesen
and Bessel-Hagen which brought it to the form shown in
Fig. 11. R is the vessel to be exhausted (a Geissler tube),
K is the bulb in which the Torricellian vacuum is produced,
P is the joint at which the rising mercury cuts off connection
of K and R, O B C the tube through which the air is expelled.
M is a bulb containing phosphorus pentoxide. It was with
pumps of this general type that exhaustion was effected for
many of the early classical experiments on cathode rays,
R6entgen rays and electronics in general. The latest type,
which was in use well into the present century, is illustrated
in Fig. 12. One advantage of this pattern is the cylindrical
inclined bulb, A, in place of the old spherical bulbs. This
gives a big volume for a small vertical displacement and also
lessens the mechanical shock of the rising, uncushioned
mercury when the pressure is low. Anyone who has used
one of the old T6pler pumps systematically knows how easy
it was to knock the head off, if the mercury reservoir was
raised without due caution.
Mention must be made of the Sprengel mercury pump,
invented in 1873, which was also extensively used by the
classic experimenters on the electric discharge. In this,
the air was carried away by a succession of falling mercury
FIG. 13. The Kaufmann pump. (Mfiller-Pouillet ; Lehrbuch der
Physik, vol. 1, 1906, Fig. 537.)
pellets, between which it was trapped. It was with an
improved form of this pump, devised by Gimingham and
having a number of tubes for the mercury fall instead of one,
that William Crookes, one of the most skilled workers on
vacuum physics in the second half of the nineteenth century,
carried out, for instance, his classic work on the radiometer.
He used phosphorus pentoxide to absorb water vapour,
precipitated sulphur to stop mercury vapour and reduced
copper to stop the sulphur vapour entering his evacuated
space. He claims to have reduced the pressure to 0.4 × 10 6
atm, say 3 × 10 3 mm of mercury, and says, " Formerly,
an air-pump, which would diminish the volume of air in the
receiver 1000 times, was said to produce a vacuum", adding
that the Sprengel pump had already ratified air a few hundred
thousand times, which in those days was very good per-
formance.
In 1905, a new period was ushered in by the invention of the
rotary vacuum pump of W. Kaufmann, in which a con-
tinuous rotation, effected by an electric motor or by hand,
carried away the air. It is illustrated in Fig. 13. It needed
a backing pump, to reduce the pressure to 2 cm of mercury
or so, a feature of all modern high-vacuum pumps. The
principle is clear : the air is trapped by the mercury in the
inclined Archimedean spiral and delivered to the roughly
evacuated space. Only a relatively few of such pumps were,
however, made, for at the end of the same year, Gaede
produced his rotary mercury vacuum pump, which, on
account of its simplicity and speed of working, was an
immediate success.
The general scheme is shown in Fig. 14, G is a cast-iron
cylindrical container, with a thick glass front B, within
which a porcelain drum, shown in section, rotates. This
drum consists of three similar compartments. With rotation
in a counter-clockwise direction, the air in W2 is displaced by
the mercury along the passage between the walls Z1 and Z2,
until it is delivered into the space above the mercury in the
outer container. Here it is removed, through s2, by the
backing pump, which produces the low pressure, 1 cm of
mercury or so, needed if the mercury level inside and outside
the drum is not to be too large. As the drum rotates, the
FIG. 14. Gaede's rotary vacuum pump.
 The History of the Vacuum Pump
volume of air in W1, entering through the passage f, from the
vessel to be exhausted, increases, to be expelled in its turn by
further rotation, and so on. By 1910 such pumps were to be
found in constant use in every continental laboratory devoted
to vacuum physics. They could produce a vacuum of 10-6 mm
of mercury.
For backing pump a mechanical rotary pump was generally
used. Gaede's so-called Kapselpumpe, or box pump, is
shown in cross-section in Fig. 15. There is an eccentrically-
FXG. 15. Gaede's box-pump.
mounted rotating cylinder, with vanes maintained in contact
with the wall of the container by springs : the mode of
operation is dear. There was nothing new about the general
q .hb
FIG. 16. Rupert's water-bolt.
design, as can be seen by comparing Fig. 15 with Fig. 16,
which shows Prince Rupert's " Water-Bolt," a water pump
47
invented some 250 years earlier, and itself not unlike a device
figured by Ramelli in 1588. Gaede's early box pump was the
forerunner of a large range of recent pumps of this general
pattern. It produced a vacuum of about 0.01 mm of mercury :
the new pumps, with improved design and special oils, can
do somewhat better than that.
In 1912, Gaede made another fundamental advance by his
invention of the molecular pump. This depends for its action
on the peculiar properties of gases at pressures so low that
the mean free path is larger than the width of the passage
that is under consideration : in this connection it may be
recalled that the mean free path of the nitrogen molecule at a
pressure of 0.001 mm of mercury is about 7 cm. At the low
pressures in question, the molecules striking a wall behave
as if the gas condensed on the wall and evaporated again.
If, therefore, the wall is moving in its own plane, the velocity
of the wall must be added to that of the molecules. In
Gaede's molecular pump, which demanded a comparatively
high fore-vacuum, a cylinder rotating at high speed gave the
rapid surface movement required. A number of grooves in
the cylinder, each divided by a tongue projecting from the
housing, were connected in series, to increase the effect.
The pump had the advantage that it dealt with condensable
vapours as well as with ordinary gases.
The construction demanded a very high degree of
mechanical skill and it was, in consequence, expensive. It
never came into general use because in 1915 Gaede invented
the vapour stream pump, which is simple to make and very
efficient. A form of the molecular pump devised by Holweck,
which was somewhat simpler to make, is, however, in its
modern form used for certain purposes.
The history of the vapour stream pump of Gaede and its
development by Langmuir and many others to the position
which it now occupies is too recent a story, and one too
familiar to all present, to be included in this brief sketch. I
should like to conclude with a tribute to Gaede, who origi-
nated so much, if not all, of the modern equipment for
winning a vacuum. He combined deep theoretical knowledge
with clear physical insight and a genius for design. Lenard
in 1926 wrote to him telling him that he had proposed him
for the Nobel prize : " Denn, mein lieber Gaede, was w~iren
wir alle ohne Sie?" It would have been an award which
would have given pleasure to many physicists. With his
inventive genius Gaede combined a character of singular
courage and probity. He was of old German descent, but
he was denounced by the Nazis as politically unreliable and
friendly to Jews, was removed from his university post and,
in general, shamefully treated for his open desire for decency.
He died in 1945 of diphtheria and undernourishment. All
honour to his memory.