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Biography of Otto Von GuerickeName: Otto Von GuerickeBirth Date: October 20, 1602 Death Date: May 11, 1686 Place of Birth: Magdeburg, Prussian Saxony (now Germany) Nationality: German Gender: Male Occupations: physicist, politician Otto Von Guericke The German physicist Otto von Guericke (1602-1686), known for his invention of the vacuum pump, also investigated the properties of air and the atmosphere.Otto von Guericke was born on November 20, 1602, in Magdeburg (then in Prussian Saxony and now Germany). At the age of 15 he entered the University of Leipzig, where he studied jurisprudence, and continued his study of law at Jena and Helmstedt. In 1623 he went on to the University of Leiden, where he pursued mathematics, mechanics, and military engineering.After traveling in France and England, Guericke returned to Magdeburg, where he married the daughter of a prominent local politician in 1626. He became active in politics and was elected to the city council in 1627. In 1631 the city was sacked and burned by the invading imperial armies; Guericke and his family barely escaped with their lives. Upon Magdeburg's liberation the following year Guericke returned as a military engineer and once again …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…all matter. Nowhere does he refer to the effects of his globe as electrical, and not until the following century was their electrical nature recognized.Most of Guericke's researches were described and published for the first time in his New Magdeburg Experiments on Empty Space (1672), a Latin work devoted largely to cosmology. However, he had completed his researches much earlier, and his experiments with the vacuum pump were described in 1657 in an appendix to a work by Kaspar Schott, a professor of physics and mathematics at Würzburg. Further Reading There is no major work on Guericke in English and no English translation of the New Magdeburg Experiments. Information on Guericke is in Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development (trans. 1893; 5th ed. 1942), which includes a discussion of Guericke's experiments, and Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science , vols. 6 and 7 (1958). |