Gasparo Berti

[3] In 1630,[1] Giovanni Battista Baliani sent a letter to Galileo Galilei after he noticed that his siphon could not raise water more than about 10 m (34 feet).

[6] Upon reading Galileo's theory, physicists Gasparo Berti and father Raffaello Magiotti decided to seek a better way to test the possibility of producing a vacuum.

What was most important about this experiment was that the lowering water had left a space above it in the tube which had no intermediate contact with air to fill it up.

[5] His claim was strongly contested however, and multiple experiments were performed attempting to disprove the existence of a vacuum.

Berti's experiment led to Evangelista Torricelli's research into the weight of air and his invention of the barometer.