Magdeburg hemispheres

Rarity: Uncommon

A topic a little better known than average, read and translated beyond its own country.

Rarity follows how well known the article is: its views on the French and English Wikipedia over a year, and the number of languages it exists in.

At a glance

Class

Notion

Domain

Science and technology

In collections

Nobody has pulled it yet.

What Wikipedia says

The Magdeburg hemispheres are a pair of large copper hemispheres with mating rims that were used in a famous 1654 experiment to demonstrate the power of atmospheric pressure. When the rims were sealed with grease and the air was pumped out, the sphere contained a vacuum and could not be pulled apart by teams of horses.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article “Magdeburg hemispheres”, under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Read the article on Wikipedia

Image: Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla from Sevilla, España, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.