| New experiments physico-mechanical touching the spring of the air and its effects | |
| 1660 |  |
| Robert Boyle(1627-1691) | |
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Between the late 1640’s and early 1650’s, a German scientist, the mayor of Magdeburg, Otto von Guericke developed a suction-air pump with which he could make a large-scale vacuum in a vessel. With this vacuum Guericke was able to carry out an experiment, entitled “the Hemisphere of Magdeburg”, in which he confirmed that great power could be obtained by means of the exhaustion of air and by the weight of air itself. Prior to the publication of this invention and experiment by Guericke himself in 1672, a Jesuit Kasper Schott described Guericke’s vacuum pump in his book ”Machanica Hydraulica-peneumatica” in 1657. Inspired by Schott’s description of Guericke’s invention and experimentation, Robert Boyle immediately undertook the improvement of Guericke’s pump and accomplished that with the great aid of Robert Hook, his assistant at that time. With this new pump. Boyle verified properties of the vacuum such as the impossibility for combustion or sound-propagation to exist in a vacuum, etc. He also carried out Torricelli’s barometer experiment in a vacuum and confirmed that the weight of air is equivalent to that of a 29-inch high column of mercury. His experience with various phenomena attended to with the use of the vacuum pump led Boyle to investigate the physical properties of air. He noted the elastic quality of the air and characterized it as “the spring of air”, then investigated the mutuality between the pressure and volume of air. Boyle attributed the elasticity of the air to the increase and the decrease of interval distance between the corpuscles of the air. This restoration of atomism became a principal idea in modern science. In this first scientific book, Boyle described all these discoveries minutely. The book promptly obtained wide repute. Two years after this edition Boyle published a second edition with an addition this was a defense of his doctrine against the attacks of Franciscus Linus and Thomas Hobbs on the first edition. In this addition, Boyle first dealt with the elasticity of the air quantitatively, and verified that its pressure is in inverse proportion to the volume of closed air. This law, still known as Boyle’s law, was the first establishment of a natural law besides the law of motion. |
