Otto von Guericke (UK: /ˈɡɛərɪkə/ GAIR-ik-ə,[1] US: /ˈɡ(w)ɛərɪkə, -ki/ G(W)AIR-ik-ə, -⁠ee,[2] German: [ˈɔtoː fɔn ˈɡeːʁɪkə] ⓘ; spelled Gericke until 1666;[3] 30 November [O.S.

[4] Von Guericke was a very pious man in the Dionysian tradition[clarification needed] 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, without beginning and end, more joyous than the perception of bountiful light' and 'comparable to the heavens'.

[3] Upon his return to Magdeburg in 1626 he married Margarethe Alemann, with whom he had three children (Anna Catherine, Hans Otto, and Jacob Christopher) before her untimely death in 1645.

In 1626, Otto von Guericke started his career as political representative of Magdeburg and accepted an official appointment to join the city council.

Only a few years later, he had luckily fled from the city before an army of the imperial Catholic League, led by the Count of Tilly had completely surrounded and cut off Magdeburg.

The material loss was also unusually high as widespread fires destroyed about 1,700 of a total of 1,900 buildings, including all of von Guericke's personal property.

In 1646, he was elected as Magdeburg's Burgomeister, the city's chief magistrate or executive, an office that arguably bestowed more power (in a practical sense) than that of a mayor.

During four decades in office he undertook numerous diplomatic missions, which took him to many European courts and councils, where he met powerful executives and secretaries and addressed the illustrious elite of dukes, kings and emperors.

[3][4][10] Otto von Guericke's first diplomatic mission on behalf of the city led him in September 1642 to the court of the Elector of Saxony at Dresden.

During a 1654 diplomatic mission to Regensburg, Guericke presented his invention of the air-pump to impress those he was going to meet and help sway the talks in his favour, as well as promote his own scientific achievements.

[11][10] Curious and inspired by the Copernican cosmology and hardly understanding 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.

[6][10] 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.

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.

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 22 July 1656.

[16] The 1660s marked the ultimate 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.

[17] Despite the Elector's crushing of Magdeburg's political aspirations, the personal relationship of von Guericke and Friedrich Wilhelm remained warm.

In January 1681, as a precaution against an outbreak of the plague then threatening Magdeburg, he and his second wife Dorothea moved to Hamburg, where their son Hans Otto lived.

In setting out his own view, von Guericke, while acknowledging the influence of previous philosophers such as Lessius (but not Gassendi), makes it clear that he considers his thinking on this topic to be original and new.

In Chapter IV of Book III he describes a new and much-improved design of vacuum pump and attributes its invention to the need for a more easily transportable machine with which he could demonstrate his experiments to Frederick William, who had expressed the desire to see them.

A number of experiments, such as the rather cruel testing of the effect of a vacuum on birds and fish (Experimenta Nova, Book III, Chapter XVI), are not described in the Technica Curiosa.

Throughout Books II and III he returns again and again to the theme of there being no abhorrence of a vacuum and that all the phenomena explained by this supposed principle are in fact attributable to the pressure of the atmosphere in conjunction with various incorporeal potencies which he held to be acting.

In countering the objection of a Dr. Deusing that the weight of the atmosphere would simply crush the bodies of all living things, he shows explicit awareness of the key property of a fluid – that it exerts pressure equally across all planes.

This device, which is usually identified as the first electrostatic generator, was developed as part of von Guericke's interest in the worldly powers (mundane virtues) that operated in the universe.

Accepting the claim of the preface to the Experimenta Nova that the entire work had been essentially completed before March 1663, von Guericke can be fairly credited with inventing a primitive form of frictional electrical machine before 1663.

By rubbing the sphere with a dry hand, von Guericke was able to impart a charge imbalance on the surface, which would allow him to attract and repel other objects.

In Book IV, Chapter 8 of the Experimenta Nova von Guericke is at pains to point out the difference between his own "incorporeal potency" views and Cabeo's more Aristotelian conclusions.

He (Cabeo) concludes by saying: 'I say therefore that from amber or any other electrically attracting body, a very rarefied effluent is emitted which dispels and attenuates the air, extremely agitating it.

Experiment visibly shows that this sulphur globe (once it has been rubbed) also exercises its potency through a linen cord up to a range of a cubit and more and can attract at that distance."

Oldenburg's review of the Experimenta Nova (November 1672) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society sceptically observes: "How far this globe may be confided in, the Tryals and Consideration of some ingenious person here may perhaps inform us hereafter."