Otto Von Guericke
1602-1686
German Physicist
Otto von Guericke, a German aristocrat and politician, made important contributions to two of the liveliest areas of physical investigation in the seventeenth century. He is credited with the invention of the air pump, a device that facilitated the study of the phenomena of vacuums.Von Guericke also constructed one of the earliest machines to produce static electricity.
Von Guericke was born in Magdeburg, a prosperous city in central Germany, into a wealthy and politically influential family. He studied law, science, and engineering at the universities of Leipzig, Helmstedt, Jena, and Leiden. Upon the completion of his studies in 1625, Guericke returned to Magdeburg where he was made an alderman, the start of a long period of public service to his native city.
Catholic troops in the service of the Hapsburg emperor set siege to Lutheran Magdeburg in 1631. Magdeburg was decimated by the attack, and Guericke left there to work for the governments of Sweden and Saxony as an engineer. He worked on behalf of Magdeburg as he traveled, serving as a foreign envoy and representative for his city. Guericke became the mayor of Magdeburg in 1646.
Settled once again in his hometown, Guericke used his leisure time to perform some remarkable scientific investigations. Like many others in the mid-seventeenth century, Guericke was interested in the philosophical problem—posed by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) but made newly fascinating by the work of René Descartes (1596-1650) and Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647)—of whether a vacuum could exist in nature. While Torricelli had investigated the behavior of mercury in glass to determine if a vacuum might exist there, Guericke sought to construct a device that could remove the air from a hollow vessel to test Descartes' idea that a container from which all the air was removed would collapse.
Guericke's first pump did eventually succeed in imploding a copper vessel made of two hemispheres (known later as Magdeburg hemispheres), but problems he encountered left him even more curious about the phenomena of pressure. He continued to design better equipment for more and more dramatic experiments. Guericke's most famous demonstration used a well-sealed pair of copper hemispheres that, when evacuated, could not be pulled apart even by powerful workhorses. Once air was admitted to the spheres, however, they immediately came apart—a memorable illustration of the power of the vacuum. Guericke eventually showed that sound could not travel in a vacuum (although light could) and that neither combustion nor respiration could take place. Guericke took advantage of his political position to gain attention for his scientific work. He announced his invention of the air pump at the Imperial Diet in 1654, andhis fellow delegates helped circulate word of Guericke's invention throughout Europe.
Otto von Guericke. (Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.)Guericke also investigated other areas of science. Related to his work on the vacuum were a series of experiments with barometers to study atmospheric pressure and meteorological conditions performed in 1660. A project that sought to simulate the magnetic properties of Earth by constructing a model of it out of sulphur led to another important, if unexpected, discovery. Guericke noticed that his model globe produced static electricity when rubbed, and he went on to make a primitive machine for the production of static electricity. This device fascinated onlookers as it attracted and repulsed feathers and other light objects. Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), among others, was very interested in Guericke's sulphur globe, but they all had difficulty reproducing the effects Guericke had reported. Because of these difficulties—the sulfur globe requires very particular humidity conditions to perform—Guericke's discoveries had to be repeated in new contexts before their results were accepted as reliable electrical phenomena.
Von Guericke was made a nobleman in 1666. He retained his post as mayor of Magdeburg until 1676. He retired to Hamburg in 1681, and died there in 1686.
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