Everything about Evangelista Torricelli totally explained
Evangelista Torricelli (
October 15,
1608 –
October 25,
1647) was an
Italian physicist and
mathematician, best known for his invention of the
barometer.
Biography
Torricelli was born in
Faenza, then part of the
Papal States. He was left fatherless at an early age and educated under the care of his uncle, a
Camaldolese monk, who first entered young Torricelli in a
Jesuit College in 1624 to study mathematics and philosophy until 1626, when he sent Toricelli to
Rome in 1627 to study science under the
Benedictine Benedetto Castelli, professor of
mathematics at the
Collegio della Sapienza in
Pisa.
In 1632, shortly after the publication of
Galileo's
Dialogues of the New Science, Torricelli wrote to Galileo of reading it "with the delight [...] of one who, having already practised all of geometry most diligently [...] and having studied
Ptolemy and seen almost everything of
Tycho [Brahe],
Kepler and
Longomontanus, finally, forced by the many congruences, came to adhere to
Copernicus, and was a Galileian in profession and sect". (The Vatican condemned Galileo in June 1633, and this was the only known occasion on which Torricelli openly declared himself to hold the Copernican view.)
Aside from several letters, little is known of Torricelli's activities in the years between 1632 and 1641, when Castelli sent Torricelli's monograph of the path of projectiles to Galileo, then a prisoner in his villa at
Arcetri. Although Galileo promptly invited Torricelli to visit, he didn't accept until just three months before Galileo's death. During his stay, however, he wrote out Galileo's Discourse of the Fifth day. After Galileo's death on January 8, 1642, Grand Duke
Ferdinando II de' Medici asked him to succeed Galileo as the grand-ducal mathematician and professor of mathematics in the
University of Pisa. In this role he solved some of the great mathematical problems of the day, such as finding a
cycloid's area and center of gravity. He also designed and built a number of telescopes and simple microscopes; several large lenses, engraved with his name, are still preserved at Florence. In 1644, he famously wrote in a letter: "We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air."
Torricelli died in Florence a few days after having contracted
typhoid fever, and was buried in San Lorenzo. The
asteroid 7437 Torricelli was named in his honor.
Contributions to physics
Torricelli's chief invention was the barometer, which arose from solving an important practical problem. Pumpmakers of the Grand Duke of Tuscany attempted to raise water to a height of 12 meters or more, but found that 10 meters was the limit to which it would rise in the suction pump. Torricelli thought to employ
mercury, fourteen times as heavy as water. In 1643 he created a tube c. 1 meter long, sealed at the top end, filled it with mercury, and set it vertically into a basin of mercury. The column of mercury fell to about 76cm, leaving a Torricellian vacuum above. As we now know, the column's height fluctuated with changing atmospheric pressure; this was the first barometer. This discovery has perpetuated his fame, and the
torr, a unit of
pressure, was named in his honor.
Torricelli also discovered
Torricelli's Law, regarding the speed of a fluid flowing out of an opening, which was later shown to be a particular case of
Bernoulli's principle.
Selected works
His manuscripts are preserved at Florence, Italy. The following have appeared in print:
- Trattato del moto (before 1641)
- Opera geometrica (1644)
- Lezioni accademiche (printed 1715)
- Esperienza dell'argento vivo (Berlin, 1897)
Further Information
Get more info on 'Evangelista Torricelli'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://evangelista_torricelli.totallyexplained.com">Evangelista Torricelli Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
