Background
Otto von Guericke was born on November 20, 1602 in Magdeburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany.
Thr 3d page of "Experimenta nova (ut vocantur) magdeburgica de vacuo spatio"
The fisrt page of "Experimenta nova (ut vocantur) magdeburgica de vacuo spatio"
"Magdeburg Hemispherest". A famous painting depicts horses attempting to pull the hemispheres apart.
Otto von Guericke was born on November 20, 1602 in Magdeburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany.
Otto von Guericke was privately tutored until the age of fifteen. In 1617 he began studying law and philosophy at the Leipzig University. However, in 1620 his studies at Leipzig were disrupted by his father's death. He briefly returned home before continuing his studies at the Academia Julia in Helmstedt and the universities of Jena and Leiden. It was at Leyden that he first began attending courses on mathematics, physics, and fortification engineering. His education was completed by a nine-month Grand Tour to France and England.
Otto von Guericke's political career began upon his return to Magdeburg in 1626. He and his family were educated and well-known; his father and his grandfather had been mayor of the city, which led to von Guericke being appointed an Alderman of Magdeburg. He was forced to flee Magdeburg during the Holy Roman Empire's brutal sack of the city during the Thirty Years' War, in which four fifths of the city's population perished. This attack destroyed most of the city as well as von Guericke's personal wealth. Otto von Guericke returned to Magdeburg in 1631 and, because of his engineering background, led the rebuilding process of the town.
After this rebuilding, Otto von Guericke became a master brewer to rebuild his and the town's wealth. In 1646, he was elected as Magdeburg's Burgomeister, similar to mayor. He remained in this position for more than thirty years until his retirement from office in 1678, after much pressure from younger politicians. During his time in office Otto von Guericke went on many diplomatic missions and met with many kings and emperors. In 1666 Otto von Guericke was given aristocratic status by Emperor Leopold I, giving the "von" title to his name and changing the spelling of his last name from "Gericke" to "Guericke".
Otto von Guericke used both his political status and scientific knowledge in tandem to make political gains for his town. His demonstrations of his inventions, such as the air pump and electrostatic generator, were used to impress his audiences and allow for political communications to unfold. He often would not explain scientifically how his shows worked leading people to believe in his wizardry, promoting his status as a great leader. His first diplomatic mission on behalf of the city, in September 1642, was to the court of the Elector of Saxony at Dresden to seek some mitigation of the harshness with which the Saxon military commander treated Magdeburg. In 1648 Otto von Guericke represented the city at the treaty delegations following the end of the Thirty Year's War. During another diplomatic mission to Ratisbon in 1654, Otto von Guericke used his invention of the air pump to impress those he was meeting and help sway the meeting in his favor, as well as promote his own scientific advancements. Diplomatic missions, often dangerous as well as tedious, occupied much of his time for the next twenty years. A private scientific life, of which much remains unclear, was developing in parallel.
Inspired by Copernican cosmology and the idea of vast, endless, empty space where light could propagate, bodies could move about unhindered, and sound cannot be detected, Otto von Guericke set about replicating this phenomena on Earth. He first started investigating the concept of a vacuum through the use of fire pumps by pumping water out of wooden barrels. However, he soon figured out that the porosity of wood was allowing unwanted water, filled with dissolved air, to enter. The pressure fluctuations experienced inside the barrel were allowing this encapsulated air to escape: spoiling the vacuum inside. In 1647 he turned his focus to pumping out enclosed air instead of water to solve this problem.
His scientific and diplomatic pursuits finally intersected when, at the Reichstag in Regensburg in 1654, he was invited to demonstrate his experiments on the vacuum before the highest dignitaries of the Holy Roman Empire. One of the professors at the College, Fr. Gaspar Schott, entered into friendly correspondence with Otto von Guericke and thus it was that, at the age of 55, von Guericke's work was first published as an Appendix to a book by Fr. Schott - Mechanica Hydraulico-pneumatica - published in 1657. The following year this was translated into Latin and, made aware of it in correspondence with Fr. Schott, Otto von Guericke acquired a copy.
In the decade following the first publication of his own work Otto von Guericke, in addition to his diplomatic and administrative commitments, was scientifically very active. He embarked upon his magnum opus - Ottonis de Guericke Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de Vacuo. In 1664, his work again appeared in print.
The 1660s saw the final collapse of Magdeburg's aim, to which Otto von Guericke had devoted some twenty years of diplomatic effort, of achieving the status of a Free City within the Holy Roman Empire. On behalf of Magdeburg, he was the first signatory to the Treaty of Klosterberg (1666) whereby Magdeburg accepted a garrison of Brandenburg troops and the obligation to pay dues to the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm I of Brandenburg. Despite the Elector's crushing of Magdeburg's political aspirations, the personal relationship of von Guericke and Friedrich Wilhelm remained warm. The Great Elector was a patron of scientific scholarship; he had employed von Guericke's son, Hans Otto, as his Resident in Hamburg and in 1666 had named Otto von Guericke himself to the Brandenburg Rat. When the Experimenta Nova finally appeared it was prefaced with a fulsome dedication to Friedrich Wilhelm.
In 1677 Otto von Guericke, after repeated requests, was reluctantly permitted to step down from his civic responsibilities. In January 1681, as a precaution against an outbreak of plague then affecting Magdeburg, he and his second wife Dorothea moved to the home of his son Hans Otto in Hamburg. There Otto von Guericke died peacefully on May 11 (Julian) 1686, 55 years to the day after he had fled the flames in 1631. His body was returned to Magdeburg for interment in the Ulrichskirche on May 23 (Julian).
Otto von Guericke was also a very spiritual man in the Dionysiac tradition, as were many scientists of the Enlightenment, and connected the vacuum of space to an infinite divinity.
In 1626 Otto von Guericke married Margarethe Alemann. Before Margarethe's death in 1645, they had three children together: Anna Catherine, Hans Otto, and Jacob Christopher. Anna Catherine and Jacob Christopher both died in infancy. Von Guericke later remarried to Dorotha Lentke in 1652.