Fleuss’s Geryk pump

It is my business to move molecules around. In the lab I routinely pump, squirt, dribble and blow fluids; even at home I shove air into the tyres of my bicycle using a piston and cylinder arrangement, the track pump. Try as I might, I cannot escape the echoes of distant thoughts and experiments in the 17th century.

Around 1643, two of Galileo Galilei’s students, Vincenzo Viviani and Evangelista Torricelli, famously succeeded in prying apart an empty space in their lab that they concluded was that Aristotelian anathema, the vacuum; Torricelli also suggested that the previously imponderable air actually had a weight.

In 1650, the brewer and diplomat Otto Guericke would invent a way of creating vacuums by moving the air inside a cylinder with a piston, using leather flaps as non-return valves – effectively an early bike(-less) pump. Guericke’s famous public demonstration, conducted in 1657, that two half-metre hemispheres, evacuated internally, could not be pulled apart by two teams of eight horses, was so spectacular that it contributed to a growing vacuum fever.