Otto von Guericke

Otto von Guericke (1602 to 1686) was a German scientist, inventor, mathematician and physicist from a patrician family of Magdeburg, where he joined the city council and in 1646 was elected Burgomeister. He developed experimental methods and repeatable demonstrations on the physics of the vacuum, atmospheric pressure and electrostatic repulsion, and he presented his air-pump at Regensburg in 1654 to impress the people he met on diplomatic missions. His demonstrations of the air-pump and the electrostatic generator were also meant to improve political communication. The Energy Atlas holds him as an early maker of apparatus that produced electric charge and worked with a vacuum, years before the engines and electrical machines that later used those ideas.