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But in 1666 he was lured to Paris by an offer of a position at France’s Academy of Sciences. Huygens spent most of his life in the Hague, and became a fellow of the Royal Society, across the channel in England. Indeed, Christian Huygens, the most zealous proponent of the gunpowder engine, believed it could do far more. If that energy could be tamed and put to a more gradual kind of work, it could provide a new alternative to the watermill and windmill.

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A few pounds of gunpowder could drive a cannonball with enough force to crack a stone wall, stave in the oaken sides of a ship, or rip a column of men asunder. It was natural for inventors of the age to turn first to gunpowder, the most powerful source of energy known at the time, as a more effective way of evacuating the cylinder. This was a fine demonstration of the weight of the air, but hardly a practical device, since it just turned one form of mechanical work (to pump out the air) into another, at a loss. In 1661, von Guericke produced the first reverse suction pump, lifting weight with a piston by drawing the air out from under it with a suction pump. Inventors first tried a more direct approach – burning fuel within the piston itself. The injection of hot steam from an external boiler to move a piston was by no means an obvious way to exploit the weight of the air. We will see this interplay between practical mechanics and philosophical inquiry recur in this story.īut the streams of thought that led from Torricelli to Newcomen were meandering ones.

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The science of pressure thus came full circle – questions opened by mining pumps, when closed, had helped to develop a better one. His engine condensed steam to generate power from the weight of the air, relying on the new scientific knowledge developed by Torricelli, Pascal, von Guericke, and others, in the previous century. In the early years of the eighteenth century, Thomas Newcomen devised the first practical engine for pumping water out of a mine.

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