Evangelista Torricelli - The History of the Barometer The History of the Barometer The History of the Barometer Evangelista Torricelli invented the mercurial barometer Malcolm Piers/ The Image Bank/ Getty Images By Mary Bellis Updated February 03, 2016. Barometer - Pronunciation: [b u rom´ u t u r] - a barometer is an instrument for measuring atmospheric pressure. Two common types are the aneroid barometer and the mercurial barometer (invented first). Evangelista Torricelli invented the first barometer, known as the "Torricelli's tube". Biography - Evangelista Torricelli Evangelista Torricelli was born October 15, 1608, in Faenza, Italy and died October 22, 1647 in Florence, Italy. He was a physicist and mathematician. In 1641, Evangelista Torricelli moved to Florence to assist the astronomer Galileo . The Barometer It was Galileo that suggested Evangelista Torricelli use mercury in his vacuum experiments. Torricelli filled a four-foot long glass tube with mercury and inverted the tube into a dish.

Some of the mercury did not escape from the tube and Torricelli observed the vacuum that was created. Evangelista Torricelli became the first scientist to create a sustained vacuum and to discover the principle of a barometer. continue reading below our video What to Do If You Can't Pay Your Student Loans Torricelli realized that the variation of the height of the mercury from day to day was caused by changes in the atmospheric pressure. Torricelli built the first mercury barometer around 1644. Evangelista Torricelli - Other Research Evangelista Torricelli also wrote on the quadrature of the cycloid and conics, the rectifications of the logarithmic spiral, the theory of the barometer, the value of gravity found by observing the motion of two weights connected by a string passing over a fixed pulley, the theory of projectiles and the motion of fluids. Lucien Vidie - Aneroid Barometer In 1843, the French scientist Lucien Vidie invented the aneroid barometer.

A aneroid barometer "registers the change in the shape of an evacuated metal cell to measure variations on the atmospheric pressure." Aneriod means fluidless, no liquids are used, the metal cell is usually made of phosphor bronze or beryllium copper. Related Instruments An altimeter is an aneroid barometer that measures altitude. Meteorologists use an altimeter that measures the altitude with respect to sea level pressure. A barograph is an aneroid barometer that gives a continuous reading of atmospheric pressures on graph paper. Evangelista Torricelli, Italian physicist - Stock Image H420/0195 - Science Photo Library Evangelista Torricelli, Italian physicist Credit: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Caption: Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647), Italian physicist, inventing the barometer. Torricelli worked on the dynamics of falling bodies with B. Castelli. This led to him being appointed assistant to Galileo. He succeeded Galileo as mathematician to the court of Tuscany.

Torricelli was interested in pure maths and experimental physics, but he is best remembered for his invention of the mercury barometer and his discovery of atmospheric pressure in 1644. He later noticed that small variations in the height of the column of mercury supported by atmospheric pressure were related to changes in the weather. Engraving from The Atmosphere (1873) by Camille Flammarion. Release details: Model release not required. Property release not required. Weather Doctor's Weather People and History: The Invention of the Barometer Home | Welcome | What's New | Site Map | Glossary | Weather Doctor Amazon Store | Book Store | Accolades | Email Us The Invention of the Barometer The barometer is one of the key instruments in the science of meteorology, and it was instrumental in answering a fundamental question of natural philosophy at the time of its invention: "Does the air have weight?". Construction of the first barometer in the mid-17th Century is commonly attributed to Evangelista Torricelli of the Florentine Academy, although Gasparo Berti unknowingly built the first one while trying to produce a vacuum a few years earlier. The story behind the development of the barometer goes like this.

In a letter dated 1630, Giovan Battista Baliani a patrician from Genoa, asked Galileo Galilei for the reason why water did not rise through the syphon he had designed to carry water over a hill about 21 metres (70 ft) high. The prevailing thinking on how a suction pump worked held that the pump action created a vacuum, and, since "nature abhors a vacuum," the water immediately rose to fill the evacuated space. There was, it was believed, no limit to the height to which water could be raised. Experience showed something was amiss. Galileo investigated the situation and reported that the working limits of a suction pump made it impossible to raise a column of water any higher than 11 metres (33 ft). Beyond this limit, the vacuum force was insufficiently powerful to prevent the column of water from collapsing. Galileo passed his concern over the problem to his disciple Torricelli. Torricelli devised an experiment -- conducted by his student Vincenzo Viviani in 1643 -- which actually proved air had weight. To do so, they constructed the prototype mercury barometer.

Torricelli had first built a water barometer, but it required a very long (18 m / 60 ft) and clumsy glass tube. By substituting mercury, which at room temperature is a liquid and about thirteen times more dense than water, he was able to reduce the working tube length to around 90 cm (35 inches). Torricelli's instrument consisted of a long-necked glass tube with a closed bulbous end. The tube was filled with mercury and then inverted into a basin also filled with mercury. Rather than run completely out of the tube, the height of the mercury column fell to a level of about 76 cm (30 inches) and then remained fairly steady, The top of the mercury column was observed to fluctuate by a few percent, in part due to changes in temperature and in part due to what we now know to be fluctuations in atmospheric pressure above the instrument. Torricelli was convinced by this experiment that what held up the mercury column was the weight or pressure that the air exerted on the mercury in the basin. He also believed that the space above the liquid created by the descent of the mercury in the tube was completely empty, a true and stable vacuum.

As often happens in science, similar lines of thinking and experiments were taking place elsewhere, and perhaps some information was exchanged between scientists. Thus, although Torricelli is universally credited with inventing the barometer, two other noteworthy efforts must be cited. Historical documentation also suggests Gasparo Berti, an Italian mathematician and astronomer, may have performed similar experiments to Torricelli's a few years earlier while also working on Galileo's problem. Berti apparently constructed a huge lead tube, around 13 m (40 ft) long and attached it to his house. He filled the tube with water, then sealed the top. When the bottom of the tube was opened into a filled pail of water, the water level in the tube dropped then didn't move. Berti claimed that he had produced a vacuum in the tube above the water line, the result he sought, but likely he did not realize he had also just built a huge, and the first, barometer. In 1648, French mathematician Blaise Pascal (after whom the basic SI unit of pressure, the pascal, is named) put forward a theory that air pressure decreased with altitude above sea level.

He enlisted his brother-in-law Florin Perier to carry a barometer up to the peak of the Puy-de-Dome mountain in the Massif Central of France. Perier was astonished to observe a much diminished mercury column height by about 8.6 cm (3.6 inches) when he reached the 1490-m (4888-ft) summit compared to his base reading, confirming Pascal's hypothesis. For about twenty years thereafter, development of the barometer was slow. Then in 1665, Englishman Robert Hooke created the wheel barometer which added a circular scale and dial assembly to the mercury barometer. Barometer development and refinement then began a century of great progress. The word barometer to describe the pressure measuring instrument has been attributed to English scientist Robert Boyle who in a 1669 manuscript Continuation of New Experiments described plans for a truly portable barometer. The concept of the aneroid (meaning "without liquid") barometer in which pressure changes were detected using a sealed bellows was proposed by the eminent mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz around 1700 but never constructed.

The first working version of the now-common aneroid barometer was built in 1843 by French scientist Lucien Vidie. By removing the need for the delicate mercury column and easy-to-spill liquid, the aneroid barometer was a very portable instrument. Thus, it became as common a meteorological instrument for explorers and field researchers. With its ability to foretell weather changes, the barometer became a common tool for mariners and farmers who could afford to own one. Soon, many homes had a barometer hanging on their wall. Today, sensitive electronic sensors have replaced the metal aneroid cells as the detector of choice for home and workplace use as well as many scientific applications. These detectors, coupled with microprocessor chips, have allowed the construction of pocket barometers/altimeters at prices affordable to many. Learn More From These Relevant Books Chosen by The Weather Doctor 10 Fascinating Inventions From The Italian Renaissance 10 Fascinating Inventions From The Italian Renaissance Updated: 13 October 2016 Although it is best known for its cultural and artistic advancements, the Italian Renaissance was also a period of significant scientific progress too.

We take a look at some of the era’s most interesting inventions, from Leonardo da Vinci’s parachute to Galileo’s precursor to the modern thermometer. Barometer Inspired by the father of modern science Galileo Galilei’s writings, Rome -born physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli is credited with inventing the first working barometer in 1643 after noting – via an experiment involving a huge 35-foot glass tube – the effects of changes in air pressure on water levels. Although his initial experiments were rather clunky, Torricelli found that by using a liquid heavier than water (notably, mercury), a much shorter tube could be used to measure atmospheric pressure. While Torricelli’s invention today is commonplace, his advancements were apparently concerning at the time to his fellow citizens, and during his initial experiments, rumors circulated about his possible involvement in witchcraft. Barometer | © Brian Black/Flickr Parachute Though French scientist and inventor Louis-Sébastien Lenormand may be credited with designing the world’s first practical parachute in the late 18th century, legendary Renaissance artist and polymath Leonardo da Vinci actually drew up designs for a parachute some 200 years earlier.

Though his design was never realized during his lifetime and many skeptics doubted its practical viability, in 2000, British skydiver Adrian Nicholas successfully tested a prototype based on the artist’s drawings, proving retroactively that Da Vinci had indeed designed the world’s first working parachute. Said the late Nicholas (who sadly died in an unrelated accident) of the experiment, “It took one of the greatest minds who ever lived to design it, but it took 500 years to find a man with a brain small enough to actually go and fly it.” Parachute | © Christophe Pelletier/Flickr Thermoscope Rather than a specific invention aligned with a specific inventor, the thermoscope – a kind of precursor to the modern thermometer that, instead of accurately measuring temperature, detected changes in temperature – was more of a development helped along by the experiments and designs of various brilliant Renaissance era minds.

However, it was Galileo Galilei’s late 16th century thermoscope designs – based on a water-filled glass flask attached to a vertical pipe containing a glass ball that would rise and fall as it changed in temperature – that became well known, although the mercury-based designs that came to be the modern thermometer were not developed until the early 18th century by German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. Galileo’s thermoscope | © Chatsam/WikiCommons Italic Typeface The slanting italic typeface was a joint invention between early 16th century Venetian printer, publisher Aldus Manutius, and his punch-cutter Francesco Griffo, and was first used in 1500 on an illustrated title page of an edition of Catherine of Siena’s letters published by Manutius’ printing company, Aldine Press.

Though today italics are used to emphasize certain words, Manutius’ original aim of its design was two-fold: firstly, to save space in the Aldine Press’ typically small books and thus save on paper costs, and secondly, to mimic a popular handwriting style – cancellaresca, a cursive script favored by the learned and wealthy – that would appeal to a desirable market. Book of Horace by Aldus Manutius | © Garabombo/WikiCommons Robotic Knight While a 15th century robot might be beyond belief, Leonardo da Vinci designed what was possibly the world’s first precursor to the modern robot way back in 1495. Referred to as his “robotic knight,” the design – thought to have been first exhibited at a celebration held by the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza – consisted of a suit of armor rigged with gears and wheel and attached to a complicated pulley system that allowed for movement of the knight. In 2002, American roboticist Mark Rosheim – the author of Leonardo’s Lost Robots and a designer for NASA robots – successfully built a working prototype robotic knight based on Da Vinci’s designs.

Model of Da Vinci’s robotic knight | © Rama/WikiCommons Violin As with many inventions, the violin was more of a work in progress than a single, stand-alone invention: indeed, its predecessors – the vielle, rebec and lira de braccio among them – were all instrumental (pardon the pun) in its development. The exact inventor of the violin is therefore difficult to pin down, though most scholars agree that northern Italian luthier Andrea Amati was the first maker of the violin as we largely know it today. A beautiful design crafted from spruce, maple and ebony by Andrea Amati in around 1560, the ex ‘Kurtz’ violin , is housed today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Violin | © Robin Zebrowski/Flickr Anemometer In 1450 Genoa -born Leon Battista Alberti – a multidisciplinary Renaissance man whose work encompassed literature, architecture (the façade for Florence’s beautiful Palazzo Rucellai was just one of his architectural commissions), philosophy, and cryptography, to name but a few – designed a wind speed measuring device called the anemometer.

A simple, mechanical design consisting of a disk placed perpendicular to the wind that indicated wind force according to the inclined angle of the disk, Battista Alberti’s prototype was later improved upon by both Leonardo da Vinci and 17th century English scientist Robert Hooke. Anemometer | © Aidan/Flickr Armored Car We may very well have Leonardo da Vinci to thank for inspiring the modern tank — during the 1480s, he drew up designs for an armored car. He assured Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, that it would be a “safe and assailable” machine on the battlefield. Oddly for the usually meticulous da Vinci, his design featured a serious flaw – the machine’s cranks were placed in opposite directions, effectively rendering it immobile. Scholars have suggested that da Vinci, a pacifist at heart, may have included the flaw deliberately to prevent his design from ever being practically used in warfare, or simply to protect his invention from plagiarism.

Da Vinci’s design for an armored car | © TTaylor/WikiCommons The Condom Though various forms of condom-like contraception had been used prior to the Italian Renaissance (scholars have pointed out use of condoms crafted from animal organs in both Ancient Rome and late 14th century China ), most concede that it was physician and anatomist Gabriele Fallopio that came up with the design for a more modern condom. In a book titled De Morbo Gallico (or ‘The French Disease,’ the Renaissance era term for syphilis) published two years after his death, Fallopio described a chemical soaked piece of linen placed over the glans of the penis and secured with a ribbon that he tested on 1,100 men and found to be successful in the protection against syphilis. Condoms | © Steven Depolo/Flickr Scuba Diving Gear While living in Venice, Leonardo da Vinci devised a crafty invention intended to protect the City of Water from seaborne attacks – a Renaissance era precursor to modern scuba diving gear.

His designs featured a diving suit made from leather, a protective facemask equipped with goggles, and breathing tubes attached to a bell-shaped floating device providing access to air that would allow users to sabotage enemy ships from below the water. Although the first commercially successful scuba gear, designed by Frenchmen Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan, didn’t appear until the early 1940s, diver Jacquie Cozens successfully tested a prototype she built based on da Vinci’s designs in shallow waters in 2003. A Series of Tubes - Scientific American Blog Network A Series of Tubes By Jennifer Ouellette on July 11, 2011 Share on Facebook Advertisement | Report Ad Imagine, if you will, a secret community dwelling beneath the streets of New York City, its inhabitants never allowed to travel to the surface or to interact in any way with the dreaded "Topsiders." That's the premise of an award-winning 1999 YA novel by Neal Shusterman called Downsiders , exploring what happens when a 14-year-old Downsider named Talon defies the prohibition and ends up falling in love with a Topsider named Lindsay.

Together, they uncover the mysterious origins of the Downsiders: a forgotten inventor named Alfred Ely Beach who created the array of tunnels over a century ago. This is an instance where science fiction bumps up briefly against science fact, because Shusterman's inspiration for his subterranean world is based on an actual person. Alfred Ely Beach is best known for his invention of New York City's first concept for a subway: the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which would move people rapidly from one place to another in "cars" propelled along long tubes by compressed air. Beach was also the publisher of Scientific American back in 1845, when he purchased it (at the ripe old age of 20) with a fellow investor, so it seems a fitting topic for my inaugural post on that magazine's fledgling blog network. ( According to Wikipedia , inventor Rufus Porter actually founded the magazine, but sold it to Beach after a mere 10 months.) Tunnels and pneumatic transportation systems are a staple of classic science fiction, starting with Jules Verne's Paris in the 20th Century (1863), in which the author envisions tube trains stretching across the ocean.

In 1882, Albert Robida described not only tube trains, but pneumatic postal delivery systems in his novel, The Twentieth Century. Those authors were quite prescient: versions of such systems were actually built, and some still exist today. When I was a kid, I remember my mom using the banking drive-through teller to deposit checks, withdraw cash, etc., through a pneumatic system employing metal canisters. Some of those systems still exist, despite the proliferation of ATMs. Hospitals, factories, and large stores use internal pneumatic transport systems to rapidly move physical objects (drugs, documents, cash, even spare parts) from one location to another. And it all emerged from a vacuum -- specifically, vacuum physics. Nature Abhors a Vacuum The first recorded experiments on the existence of vacuum were apparently conducted by an Arab philosopher named Al-Farabi in the 9th century AD, using handheld plungers in water. That's when he realized that the volume of air would expand to fill any available space. Later scientists figured out how to create better and better artificial vacuums, thanks to the principle he delineated.

It's pretty simple: by expanding the volume of a given container, pressure is reduced and a partial vacuum is created. It's temporary and is soon filled by air pushing inside by atmospheric pressure, but if the container is repeatedly sealed, the air pumped out, expanded again, and closed off, it's possible to create a sealed vacuum chamber. Vacuum is measured in units of pressure. Technically, the standard unit of pressure is the Pascal, but scientists can't possibly let things be so simple, so they came up with a new unit for vacuum pressure, the Torr, named after 17th century Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli, best known for inventing the barometer. He was trying to figure out how to raise water levels in a suction pump to more than 32 feet in height -- the limit pumpmakers had been able to reach using simple suction pumping. It seemed that perhaps Nature truly did abhor a vacuum, but Galileo Galilei cheekily suggested that perhaps the abhorrence only extended to 32 feet. Galileo knew a little something about the weight of air versus other substances, and thought it might be possible to overcome the obstacle using something heavier than water.

Inspired by Galileo's insight, in 1643, Torricelli hit on the notion of using mercury, which is 14 times heavier than water, in a simple experiment: he filled a three-foot-long tube with mercury and sealed it on one end, then set it vertically into a basin of mercury with the open end submerged. The column of mercury fell about 28 inches, leaving an empty space above its level -- an early version of a sustained manmade vacuum. Torricelli further realized that (a) the mercury would rise to the same level regardless of how tilted the tube became because the pressure of the mercury would balance the weight of the air, and (2) the height of the column of mercury rose and fell according to changing atmospheric pressure. Voila! The first barometer. Seven years later, a German scientist named Otto von Guericke built a contraption known as the Magdeburg hemispheres -- the world's first artificial vacuum. He took two large copper hemispheres with rims that fit tightly together, sealed the rims with grease, and pumped out all the air.

To do so, he had to invent a vacuum pump; his version used a piston and cylinder with flap valves, powered by people turning a crank arm that was connected to the pump. Once all the air was removed from within the hemispheres, they were still held together by the air pressure of the surrounding atmosphere because the artificial vacuum inside provided no opposing pressure to balance things out. It was a pretty powerful hold, too: von Guericke harnessed a team of eight horses to one hemisphere of the big coppery globe, and another eight horses to the other hemisphere, and then set the horses to pulling the two hemispheres apart by moving in opposite directions -- to no avail. News of the experiment quickly spread throughout Europe, eventually reaching the ears of Robert Boyle, founder of modern chemistry, in England. Few scientists were able to replicate von Guericke's feat because it was an expensive apparatus. But Boyle had the 17th century equivalent of a trust fund, being the son of the Earl of Cork, so he cheerfully set about building his own "pneumatic engine," cost be damned. To do so, he enlisted the aid of Robert Hooke of Micrographia fame, then Boyle's humble assistant.

Hooke had a gift for instrumentation, which is a good thing, because Boyle's design was a clunky, difficult to operate device, and sometimes Hooke was the only one who could get the thing to work properly. Boyle conducted many different experiments to determine the properties of air, specifically how "rarefied air" affected things like combustion, magnetism, sound, barometers, and various substances. He carefully detailed his observations for posterity in a very thick book ponderously titled, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects (Made, for the Most Part, in a New Pneumatical Engine). He clearly lacked the gift of catchy titles. Jen-Luc Piquant would have called it something more dramatic, like Asphyxiated! Staring Into the Void of the New Pneumatical Engine. Suck and Blow It was only a matter of time before scientists and engineers figured out how to exploit vacuum technology in their inventions, most notably pneumatic tube transport systems to deliver messages or small parcels among various hubs.

A Scottish engineer named William Murdoch first conceived of the notion in the early 19th century, and as the century drew to a close, most major cities used some kind of pneumatic tube transport system. One of the earliest linked the London Stock Exchange to the city's main telegraph station, built in 1853, followed by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company linking the Euston railway station to the city's main post office. Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Chicago, and New York City all built similar networks, many of which remained operation until the 1950s. The one in Paris was operational until 1984, and apparently the UK House of Commons still has a pneumatic tube system in place for its telephone and computer exchange. And you can find older office buildings in New York with the remains of internal pneumatic mail systems still in place. Prague's pneumatic post is probably the last surviving such system in the world, housed in an annex to the city's Central Post Office. Completed in 1899, it's a complicated network of pneumatic pipes snaking out through the city's underground for roughly 34 miles.

Initially it was used primarily to forward telegrams from telegraph offices to postal offices, but the network was later extended to include government and other office buildings. This came in handy during the notorious Prague Uprising, when the city's pneumatic postal system helped bring supplies to a besieged Czech radio headquarters. At its peak, in the 1970s, the system made over one million deliveries a year, although that number had fallen to a dismal 6000 or so deliveries per year by 2000 -- hardly a profitable venture, but it's such an unusual piece of Czech history, I'm glad they fought to keep it intact. Alas, massive flooding in Europe in August 2002 damaged the system; it has yet to come back online. Part of the problem is that because the mechanical system has never been modernized, it's tough to find the component parts needed to repair it. (The Berlin factory that used to supply those parts closed down a good 60 years ago.) Modern pneumatic transport systems can vary in their complexity, but fundamentally, the concept is quite simple .

You have a "sending station" -- say, a cashier's checkout post -- linked to a receiving station -- perhaps a locked box in the store manager's office -- via a tube. There is an air compressor pump attached to the tube on the receiving end which has two basic modes of operation: "suck" and "blow." If you want to send cash from the sending to the receiving station, you'd simply load the it into the metal canister, place it in the tube, and close the door, effectively sealing off the tube. The air compressor would be set to "suck" mode, acting just like your average vacuum cleaner, sucking the air along the tube to create a partial vacuum in front of the canister. The canister can then be emptied, and returned to the sending station via the "blow" mode -- the air compressor literally pushes the canister through the tube by blowing air behind it. We have more efficient means nowadays of delivering messages (email, twitter, text messaging, etc.) but some folks still think pneumatic tube systems could be useful for, say, delivering food via pipeline.

That's the concept behind Foodtubes, a UK-based project that proposes the creation of high-speed pneumatic pipelines connecting every major city in the UK. Food items would be placed in canisters and sent zipping along the nearly 2000 miles of pneumatic tubes. It would be a major capital investment, to be sure, but might cut down on the number of delivery trucks currently clogging up London's roadways. Such a concept is far from unprecedented: until this year, there was a McDonald's in Edina, Minnesota, that prided itself on being "The World's Only Pneumatic Air Drive-Thru." Customers would place their orders in the drive-thru -- located in the middle of a parking lot -- and their Big Macs, fries, and Chicken McNuggets would be delivered via pneumatic tubes. (One assumes sodas and shakes were delivered this way, too, but the risk of spillage seems rather high.) I'd bet the consortium members are fans of Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward, which predicted a vast interlinked system of delivering goods via pneumatic tubes by the year 2000.

Sub-Rosa Subway In 1812, a man named George Medhurst speculated that it might be possible to blow carriages laden with passengers through a tunnel, but he never got around to building anything. He lacked a pump with enough power to generate the requisite air pressure. In the mid-1850s, there were several rudimentary "atmospheric railways" -- in Ireland, London, and Paris -- and while the London Pneumatic Despatch system was intended to transport parcels, it was large enough to handle people. In fact, the Duke of Buckingham and several members of the company's board of directors were transported through the pneumatic system on October 10, 1865, to mark the opening of a new station. And a prototype pneumatic railway was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1864, with plans to build a version connecting Waterloo and Charing Cross by running under the Thames. Those early efforts inspired Beach back in the US. He published an 1849 article in Scientific American suggesting building an underground subway along Broadway in Manhattan, employing horse-drawn cars to carry passengers. Then he discovered pneumatics: "A tube, a car, a revolving fan!

Little more is required!" he enthusiastically exclaimed. This was way better than boring old steam engines. The idea was to put people in carriages and propel them through underground tubes using air pressure generated by gigantic fans. He first built a prototype above-ground model, which debuted at the 1867 American Institute Fair. It was little more than large wooden tube (roughly six feet in diameter and 100 feet long) capable of holding a small vehicle with a ten-person capacity, with a gigantic fan on either end. But he couldn't get permission from the city to construct an underground system. (Accounts differ as to whether "Boss" Tweed or wealthy residents blocked his efforts in a 19th century version of "NIMBY" -- "not in my backyard.") Was Beach at all daunted? He was not. He sneakily built the underground pneumatic subway anyway, pretending he was really building a pneumatic mail delivery system, and he did it right under the nose of City Hall, beneath a rented store front across the street.

In February 1870, Beach unveiled his masterpiece, and it was an immediate novelty attraction for the public, especially given the luxury of the station: it boasted a grand piano, chandeliers, and a fully operational fountain stocked with goldfish. He fought for the next three years to get a construction permit to extend the line uptown all the way to Central Park. Alas, while he ultimately succeeded on that score, a stock market crash (the "Panic of 1873") crushed his dream for good. Beach's failure didn't keep others from speculating on so-called "vactrains" (vacuum tube trains). The US government considered the possibility in the 1960s of running a vactrain (combining pneumatic tubes with maglev technology) between Philadelphia and New York City, but the project was deemed prohibitively expensive, and was scrapped. An engineer with Lockheed named L.K. Edwards proposed a Bay Area Gravity-Vacuum Transit system for California in 1967, designed to run in tandem with San Francisco's BART system, then under construction. It, too, was never built. Nor was the system of underground Very High Speed Transportation conceived by Robert M.

Salter of RAND in the 1970s to run along what we now call the Northeast Corridor. Beach might not have lived to see his pneumatic subway system built -- he caught pneumonia and died on January 1, 1896 -- but his vision is still influencing engineers in the 21st century, most notably researchers in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. Apparently, traveling through networks of these vacuum tubes enables supersonic speeds without the drawback of sonic booms that plague supersonic jets, making the trip from London to New York in less than an hour. (Those of us who are increasingly disgruntled with the airline industry might welcome such an alternative while we're waiting for the physicists to get on the ball with human teleportation.) And Beach's dream has been immortalized in a song by a Canadian progressive rock band called Klaatu : "Sub-Rosa Subway" ( lyrics are here ).

Nearly three minutes into the tune, you can hear a bit of Morse Code in the background, which one bandmember has since helpfully translated for their fans: "From Alfred, heed thy sharpened ear -- A message we do bring -- Starship appears upon our sphere -- Through London's sky comes spring." The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Advertisement | ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S) Jennifer Ouellette Jennifer Ouellette is a science writer who loves to indulge her inner geek by finding quirky connections between physics, popular culture, and the world at large. Recent Articles Scientific Events In The History Timeline | Preceden Isaac Newton 1642 - 1727 His book "Philosophi Naturalis Principia Mathematica" published in 1687. Newton's Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that dominated scientists' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. It also demonstrated that the motion of objects on the earth and that of celestial bodies could be described by the same principles.

Antoine Lavoisier 1743 - 1794 The "father of modern chemistry," was a French nobleman prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology. He named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783) and predicted silicon (1787). He helped construct the metric system, put together the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. He was also the first to establish that sulfur was an element (1777) rather than a compound. He discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same. Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882 He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory of evolution in his(1859) book "On the Origin of Species". Sigmund Freud 1856 - 1939 Freud qualified as a Doctor of Medicine in 1881, and then carried out research into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy .

Freud postulated the existence of libido, developed therapeutic techniques, discovered transference and established its central role in the analytic process, and proposed that dreams help to preserve sleep by representing sensory stimulii as fulfilled wishes that would. As such it continues to generate extensive debate, notably over its scientific status and as to whether it advances or is detrimental to the feminist cause. Albert Einstein 1879 - 1955 He was German-born theoretical physicist.His best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula, he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.In 1917, He applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole. He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and did not go back to Germany. He helped alert President Franklin Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic weapon, reserch that eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Significant event in science Johannes Kepler 1609 He was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer.

A key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. He did fundamental work in the field of optics, invented an improved version of the refracting telescope (the Keplerian Telescope), and mentioned the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei. Galileo Galilei 1610 He was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Two New Sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials. Evzngelista Torricelli 1643 Evangelista Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician, best known for his invention of the barometer. Torricelli's chief invention was the mercury barometer, which arose from solving a practical problem.

Ole Rømer 1676 Ole Christensen Rømer was a Danish astronomer who in 1676 made the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light. In scientific literature alternative spellings such as "Roemer", "Römer", or "Romer" are common. Mikhai Lomonosov 1761 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries was the atmosphere of Venus. Lomonosov was also a poet and influenced the formation of the modern Russian literary language. Five medical scientists Rudolph Virchow 1821 - 1902 He was a German doctor, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist and politician, known for his advancement of public health. Referred to as "the father of modern pathology", he is considered one of the founders of social medicine. In 1892, he was awarded the Copley Medal. Among his most famous students was anthropologist Franz Boas, who became a professor at Columbia University.

Louis Pasteur 1822 - 1895 He was a French chemist and microbiologist who was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to treat milk and wine in order to prevent it from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurization. Alexander Fleming 1881 - 1955 He wrote many articles on bacteriology, immunology, and chemotherapy. His best-known discoveries are the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the antibiotic substance penicillin from the mould Penicillium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain. The active ingredient in that mould, which Fleming named penicillin, turned out to be an infection-fighting agent of enormous potency.

Bernardo Houssay 1887 - 1971 Bernardo Alberto Houssay was an Argentine physiologist who, in 1947, received one half Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the role played by pituitary hormones in regulating the amount of blood sugar (glucose) in animals. He is the first Argentine and Latin American Nobel laureate in the sciences. (He shared the prize with Carl Ferdinand Cori and Gerty Cori, who won for their discoveries regarding the role of glucose in carbohydrate metabolism.) Charles Drew 1904 - 1950 He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II. The research and development aspect of his blood storage work is disputed. In 1943, Drew's distinction in his profession was recognized when he became the first black surgeon selected to serve as an examiner on the American Board of Surgery.

New medical advancement A brief history of the pneumatic tube transport systems that never were A brief history of the pneumatic tube transport systems that never were Go to permalink Imagine, if you will, a secret community dwelling beneath the streets of New York City, its inhabitants never allowed to travel to the surface or to interact in any way with the dreaded "Topsiders." That's the premise of an award-winning 1999 YA novel by Neal Shusterman called Downsiders , exploring what happens when a 14-year-old Downsider named Talon defies the prohibition and ends up falling in love with a Topsider named Lindsay. Together, they uncover the mysterious origins of the Downsiders: a forgotten inventor named Alfred Ely Beach who created the array of tunnels over a century ago. Advertisement This is an instance where science fiction bumps up briefly against science fact, because Shusterman's inspiration for his subterranean world is based on an actual person. Alfred Ely Beach is best known for his invention of New York City's first concept for a subway: the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which would move people rapidly from one place to another in "cars" propelled along long tubes by compressed air.

Beach was also the publisher of Scientific American starting in 1845, when he purchased it (at the ripe old age of 20) with a fellow investor, so it seems a fitting topic for my inaugural post on that magazine's fledgling blog network. ( According to Wikipedia , inventor Rufus Porter actually founded the magazine, but sold it to Beach after a mere 10 months.) Tunnels and pneumatic transportation systems are a staple of classic science fiction, starting with Jules Verne's Paris in the 20th Century, published in 1863, in which the author envisions tube trains stretching across the ocean. In 1882, Albert Robida described not only tube trains, but pneumatic postal delivery systems in his novel, The Twentieth Century. Those authors were quite prescient: versions of such systems were actually built, and some still exist today. Advertisement When I was a kid, I remember my mom using the banking drive-through teller to deposit checks, withdraw cash, etc., through a pneumatic system employing metal canisters. Some of those systems still exist, despite the proliferation of ATMs.

Hospitals, factories, and large stores use internal pneumatic transport systems to rapidly move physical objects (drugs, documents, cash, even spare parts) from one location to another. And it all emerged from a vacuum — specifically, vacuum physics. Nature Abhors a Vacuum (Note: This section adapted from a 2007 post .) The first recorded experiments on the existence of vacuum were apparently conducted by an Arab philosopher named Al-Farabi in the 9th century AD, using handheld plungers in water. That's when he realized that the volume of air would expand to fill any available space. Later scientists figured out how to create better and better artificial vacuums, thanks to the principle he delineated. It's pretty simple: by expanding the volume of a given container, pressure is reduced and a partial vacuum is created. It's temporary and is soon filled by air pushing inside by atmospheric pressure, but if the container is repeatedly sealed, the air pumped out, expanded again, and closed off, it's possible to create a sealed vacuum chamber. Vacuum is measured in units of pressure.

Technically, the standard unit of pressure is the Pascal, but scientists can't possibly let things be so simple, so they came up with a new unit for vacuum pressure, the Torr, named after 17th century Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli, best known for inventing the barometer. He was trying to figure out how to raise water levels in a suction pump to more than 32 feet in height — the limit pumpmakers had been able to reach using simple suction pumping. Sponsored It seemed that perhaps Nature truly did abhor a vacuum, but Galileo Galilei cheekily suggested that perhaps the abhorrence only extended to 32 feet. Galileo knew a little something about the weight of air versus other substances, and thought it might be possible to overcome the obstacle using something heavier than water. Inspired by Galileo's insight, in 1643, Torricelli hit on the notion of using mercury, which is 14 times heavier than water, in a simple experiment: he filled a three-foot-long tube with mercury and sealed it on one end, then set it vertically into a basin of mercury with the open end submerged.

The column of mercury fell about 28 inches, leaving an empty space above its level — an early version of a sustained manmade vacuum. Torricelli further realized that (a) the mercury would rise to the same level regardless of how tilted the tube became because the pressure of the mercury would balance the weight of the air, and (2) the height of the column of mercury rose and fell according to changing atmospheric pressure. Voila! The first barometer. Seven years later, a German scientist named Otto von Guericke built a contraption known as the Magdeburg hemispheres — the world's first artificial vacuum. He took two large copper hemispheres with rims that fit tightly together, sealed the rims with grease, and pumped out all the air. To do so, he had to invent a vacuum pump; his version used a piston and cylinder with flap valves, powered by people turning a crank arm that was connected to the pump. Once all the air was removed from within the hemispheres, they were still held together by the air pressure of the surrounding atmosphere because the artificial vacuum inside provided no opposing pressure to balance things out.

Advertisement Advertisement It was a pretty powerful hold, too: von Guericke harnessed a team of eight horses to one hemisphere of the big coppery globe, and another eight horses to the other hemisphere, and then set the horses to pulling the two hemispheres apart by moving in opposite directions — to no avail. News of the experiment quickly spread throughout Europe, eventually reaching the ears of Robert Boyle, founder of modern chemistry, in England. Few scientists were able to replicate von Guericke's feat because it was an expensive apparatus. But Boyle had the 17th century equivalent of a trust fund, being the son of the Earl of Cork, so he cheerfully set about building his own "pneumatic engine," cost be damned. To do so, he enlisted the aid of Robert Hooke of Micrographia fame, then Boyle's humble assistant. Hooke had a gift for instrumentation, which is a good thing, because Boyle's design was a clunky, difficult to operate device, and sometimes Hooke was the only one who could get the thing to work properly.

Boyle conducted many different experiments to determine the properties of air, specifically how "rarefied air" affected things like combustion, magnetism, sound, barometers, and various substances. He carefully detailed his observations for posterity in a very thick book ponderously titled, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects (Made, for the Most Part, in a New Pneumatical Engine). He clearly lacked the gift of catchy titles. Jen-Luc Piquant would have called it something more dramatic, like Asphyxiated! Staring Into the Void of the New Pneumatical Engine. Suck and Blow Advertisement It was only a matter of time before scientists and engineers figured out how to exploit vacuum technology in their inventions, most notably pneumatic tube transport systems to deliver messages or small parcels to various linked hubs. A Scottish engineer named William Murdoch first conceived of the notion in the early 19th century. As the 19th century drew to close, most major cities used some kind of pneumatic tube transport system.

One of the earliest linked the London Stock Exchange to the city's main telegraph station, built in 1853, followed by the London Pneumatic Despatch Company linking the Euston railway station to the city's main post office. Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Chicago, and New York City all built similar networks, many of which remained operation until the 1950s. The one in Paris was operational until 1984, and apparently the UK House of Commons still has a pneumatic tube system in place for its telephone and computer exchange. And you can find older office buildings in New York with the remains of internal pneumatic mail systems still in place. Advertisement Prague's pneumatic post is probably the last surviving such system in the world, housed in an annex to the city's Central Post Office. Completed in 1899, it's a complicated network of pneumatic pipes snaking out through the city's underground for roughly 34 miles. Initially it was used to forward telegrams from telegraph offices to postal offices, but the network was later extended to include government and other office buildings.

This came in handy during the notorious Prague Uprising, when the city's pneumatic postal system helped bring supplies to a besieged Czech radio headquarters. At its peak, in the 1970s, the system made over one million deliveries a year, although that number had fallen to a dismal 6000 or so deliveries per year — hardly a profitable venture, but it's such an unusual piece of Czech history. Alas, massive flooding in Europe in August 2002 damaged the system and shut it down; it has yet to come back online. Part of the problem is that because the mechanical system has never been modernized, it's tough to find the component parts needed to repair it. (The Berlin factory that used to supply those parts closed down a good 60 years ago.) Modern pneumatic transport systems can vary in their complexity, but fundamentally, the concept is quite simple . You have a "sending station" — say, a cashier's checkout post — linked to a receiving station — perhaps a locked box in the store manager's office — via a tube.

There is an air compressor pump attached to the tube on the receiving end which has two basic modes of operation: "suck" and "blow." Advertisement If you want to send cash from the register from the sending to the receiving station, you'd simply load the it into the metal canister, place it in the tube, and close the door, effectively sealing off the tube. The air compressor would be set to "suck" mode, acting just like your average vacuum cleaner, sucking the air along the tube to create a partial vacuum in front of the canister. The canister can then be emptied, and returned to the sending station via the "blow" mode — the air compressor literally pushes the canister through the tube by blowing air behind it. We might have more efficient means nowadays of delivering messages (email, twitter, text messaging, etc.) but some folks still think pneumatic tube systems could be useful for, say, delivering food via pipeline. That's the concept behind Foodtubes, a UK-based project that proposes the creation of high-speed pneumatic pipelines connecting every major city in the UK. Food items would be placed in canisters and sent zipping along the nearly 2000 miles of pneumatic tubes.

It would be a major capital investment, to be sure, but would definitely cut down on the number of delivery trucks currently clogging up London's roadways. I'd bet the consortium members are fans of Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward, which predicted a vast interlinked system of delivering goods via pneumatic tubes by the year 2000. This sort of thing is not unprecedented: until this year, there was a McDonald's in Edina, Minnesota, that prided itself on being "The World's Only Pneumatic Air Drive-Thru." Customers would place their orders in the drive-thru — located in the middle of a parking lot — and their Big Macs, fries, and Chicken McNuggets would be delivered via pneumatic tubes. (One assumes sodas and shakes were delivered this way, too, but the risk of spillage seems rather high.) Sub-Rosa Subway Advertisement Advertisement In 1812, a man named George Medhurst speculated that perhaps it might be possible to blow carriages laden with passengers through a tunnel, but he never got around to building anything. He lacked a pump with enough power to generate the requisite air pressure.

In the mid-1850s, there were several rudimentary "atmospheric railways" — in Ireland, London, and Paris — and while the London Pneumatic Despatch system was intended to transport parcels, it was large enough to handle people. In fact, the Duke of Buckingham and several members of the company's board of directors were transported through the pneumatic system on October 10, 1865, to mark the opening of a new station. And a prototype pneumatic railway was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1864, with plans to build a version connecting Waterloo and Charing Cross by running under the Thames. Those early efforts in London inspired Beach back in the US. He first published an 1849 article in Scientific American suggesting building an underground subway along Broadway in Manhattan, employing horse-drawn cars to carry passengers. Then he discovered pneumatics: "A tube, a car, a revolving fan! Little more is required!" he exclaimed in 1870. The idea was to put people in carriages underground and propel them through the rubes using air pressure generated by gigantic fans.

He first built a prototype above-ground model, which debuted at the 1867 American Institute Fair. It was little more than large wooden tube (roughly six feet in diameter and 100 feet long) capable of holding a small vehicle with a ten-person capacity. That car was then pushed through the tube by air pressure created by a giant fan. But he couldn't get permission from the city to construct an underground system. (Accounts differ as to whether "Boss" Tweed or wealthy inhabitants of the neighborhood blocked his efforts.) Advertisement Was Beach at all daunted? He was not. He sneakily built the underground pneumatic subway anyway, pretending he was really building a pneumatic mail delivery system, and he did right under the noses of City Hall: beneath a rented store front across the street. In February 1870, Beach unveiled his masterpiece, and it was an immediate novelty attraction for the public, especially given the luxury of the station: it boasted a grand piano, chandeliers, and a fully operational fountain stocked with goldfish. He charged 25 cents for a block long ride, and fought for the next three years to get a construction permit to extend the line uptown all the way to Central Park.

Alas, while he ultimately succeeded on that score, a stock market crash (the "Panic of 1873") crushed his dream for good. Beach's failure didn't keep others from speculating on the potential value of so-called "vactrains" (vacuum tube trains). The US government considered the possibility in the 1960s of running a vactrain (combining pneumatic tubes with maglev technology) between Philadelphia and New York City, but the project was deemed prohibitively expensive, and was scrapped. Advertisement Advertisement An engineer with Lockheed named L.K. Edwards proposed a Bay Area Gravity-Vacuum Transit system for California in 1967, designed to run in tandem with San Francisco's BART system, then under construction. It, too, was never built. Nor was the system of underground Very High Speed Transportation conceived by Robert M. Salter of RAND in the 1970s to run along what we now call the Northeast Corridor.

Beach might not have lived to see his pneumatic subway system built — he caught pneumonia and died on January 1, 1896 — but his vision is still influencing engineers looking for transportation solutions in the 21st century, most notably researchers in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. The claim is that traveling through networks of these vacuum tubes enables supersonic speeds without the drawback of sonic booms that plague supersonic jets, making the trip from London to New York in less than an hour. (Those of us who are increasingly disgruntled with the airline industry, and long for teleportation, might welcome such an alternative.) And Beach's dream has been immortalized in a song by a Canadian progressive rock band called Klaatu : "Sub-Rosa Subway" ( lyrics are here ). Nearly three minutes into the tune, you can hear a bit of Morse Code in the background, which one bandmember has since helpfully translated for their fans: "From Alfred, heed thy sharpened ear — A message we do bring — Starship appears upon our sphere — Through London's sky comes spring." Top image of Alfred Ely Beach's pneumatic tube model from 1867.

This post originally appeared on Cocktail Party Physics , which can also be found at Scientific American . Gear from Kinja Deals

Question: Which 17th century Italian scientist is best remembered for inventing the Mercury Barometer?
Answer: EVANGELISTA TORRICELLI