dear juan pablo and alessandra,
please find a recording attached.
the title is: ANTLIA
it is the latin word for pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antlia
there is a star constellation named after the air pump invention by otto von guericke…
…can’t find bigger datas but would like to have the stars.
the inventor of the air pump is otto von guericke.
I worked quite a lot around his ideas of empty space.
especially for the show at secession in 2003.
best
h…
Otto von Guericke, November 20, 1602 – May 11, 1686, was a German scientist, inventor, and politician. His pioneering scientific work, the development of experimental methods and repeatable demonstrations on the physics of the vacuum, atmospheric pressure, electrostatic repulsion, his advocacy for the reality of « action at a distance » and of « absolute space » were remarkable contributions for the advancement of the Scientific Revolution.
Like all scholars and researchers of the European Age of Enlightenment, von Guericke was a very pious man in the Dionysian tradition and attributed the vacuum of space to the creations and designs of an infinite divinity. Von Guericke described this duality « as something that ‘contains all things’ and is ‘more precious than gold…more joyous that the perception of bountiful light’ and ‘comparable to the heavens’…
…Curious and inspired by the Copernican cosmology and hardly understood new ideas of vast, endless, empty space where light would propagate, bodies of matter could move about unhindered, and sound cannot be detected, von Guericke set about replicating this nothing phenomenon on Earth. Von Guericke first started investigating the concept of a vacuum through the use of fire pumps by pumping water out of wooden barrels. However, he soon realised 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 Ratisbon in 1654, he was invited to demonstrate his experiments on the vacuum before the highest dignitaries of the Holy Roman Empire. One of them, the Archbishop Elector Johann Philip von Schonborn, bought von Guericke’s apparatus from him and had it sent to his Jesuit College at Würzburg. One of the professors at the College, Fr. Gaspar Schott, entered into friendly correspondence with 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. This book came to the attention of Robert Boyle who, stimulated by it, embarked on his own experiments on air pressure and the vacuum, and in 1660 published New Experiments Physico-Mechanical touching the Spring of Air and its Effects. The following year this was translated into Latin and, made aware of it in correspondence with Fr. Schott, von Guericke acquired a copy.
In the decade following the first publication of his own work 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 Spatio — which as well as a detailed account of his experiments on the vacuum, contains his pioneering electrostatic experiments in which electrostatic repulsion was demonstrated for the first time and he sets out his theologically based view of the nature of space, but there are also contemporary arguments that he did not conceptualise these demonstrations as electrical. In the Preface to the Reader he claims to have finished the book on March 14, 1663 though publication was delayed for another nine years until 1672. In 1664, his work again appeared in print, again through the good offices of Kaspar Schott, the first section of whose book Technica Curiosa, titled Mirabilia Magdeburgica, was dedicated to von Guericke’s work. The earliest reference to the celebrated Magdeburg hemispheres experiment is on page 39 of the Technica Curiosa, where Schott notes that von Guericke had mentioned them in a letter of July 22, 1656. Schott goes on to quote a subsequent letter of von Guericke of August 4, 1657 in which he states that he now had carried out the experiment, at considerable cost, with 12 horses.
The 1660s marked the ultimative end for the Magdeburg citizen’s hope of achieving Free Imperial City status, a goal to which von Guericke had devoted some twenty years of diplomatic effort. On behalf of Magdeburg, he was the first signatory to the Treaty of Klosterberg in 1666 whereby Magdeburg accepted a garrison of Brandenburg troops (upon the withdrawal of the imperial garrison) 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 called Otto himself to the Brandenburg Rat. When the Experimenta Nova finally appeared it was prefaced with a dedication to Friedrich Wilhelm…
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Hans Schabus