Primordial Vacuum

Nothingness. That’s what a vacuum is, at least from a physics-oriented perspective.

You might raise an eyebrow to hear this cosmic phenomenon isn’t always so cosmic. People have been able to create tiny vacuums for as long as we’ve been people. Slurp at a straw until the liquid reaches the inside of your mouth, and you’ve just made a pretty crappy version of a vacuum.

Your mouth: the final frontier.

When you slurp at something, you reduce the pressure inside your mouth as compared to the outside. A perfect vacuum would have no pressure inside at all—no matter, no pressure—so everything wants to rush in. This creates a force you can use to clean things up, among other things.

Since it’s something you can fiddle with yourself, it might seem like we humans should have gotten this whole perfect vacuum thing down by now. The issue is that, no matter what we tried, we could never get much of a suck that didn’t suck.

This was not for lack of trying.

As you can imagine, our ancient ancestors understood that suction was a thing. They could just as easily think about how difficult it is to separate your cheeks from your tongue when you suck all the air out. Could this powerful force be applied through something we humans created?

It took a long time for technology to catch up to the basic science here, but by the 1600s, a real breakthrough came when Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli demonstrated a tiny, persistent vacuum at the top of a tube filled with mercury. If you’ve ever taken your temp with a mercury thermometer, you already know what this looks like.

The weird thing was that the liquid metal didn’t drop all the way down—there was something keeping gravity from doing its work, and that something was atmospheric pressure.

Tiny as it was, Torricelli had shown that more precise manufacturing techniques could now make a tangible, visible, sustainable vacuum. An ambitious German scientist, inventor, and mayor named Otto von Guericke picked up on the idea and ran with it, demonstrating his vacuum pump in dramatic fashion.

Von Guericke joined two metal hemispheres that were bigger than a basketball, sucking the air between them out and creating a powerful force that nobody could separate with their physical strength. In fact, literal teams of horses couldn’t pull the hemispheres apart. I told you the fashion was dramatic.

It’s not exactly a hop, skip, and jump to modern vacuum cleaners like you might have in your home today, but the foundation was laid in the 1600s.