How and when did humans discover there was no air in space?

Question

How and when did humans discover there was no air in space?

In: 1574

Answer 1

Scientists noticed long ago that air pressure decreases as you climb mountains. It was Blaise Pascal (who the unit of pressure Pascals is named after) who conducted this experiment which led other scientists to believe that at a certain altitude, you would get a near-perfect vacuum.

Answer 2

1643 Torricelli ~~indebted~~ (typo!) invented the barometer (to measure air pressure)

1648 Perier (prompted by his brother in law, Pascal) climbed Mount Puy de Dome with a barometer. Noticed that atmospheric pressure decreased with altitude

1659 von Guericke experimented with the vacuum pump. He concluded that the atmosphere was around the earth in a shell, getting less dense with altitude, and so it must reach a vacuum at some point

1687 Newton put forward his theory of Universal Gravitation

Answer 3

As you go up mountains, the air becomes “thinner”. This is clear from human experience at higher elevations. Mountain climbers face difficulty breathing, and they also observed instruments to measure pressure (the barometer) in the mountains in the 1600s.

From this it’s fairly easy to extrapolate that as you keep going higher, the air will keep reducing, till you reach some point where there’s no air, or almost no air.

Now the first real objects to reach space came in the 1940s (German v2 rockets), and definition of the boundary between earth and space (Karman line) were first proposed in the late 1950s. Sputnik and Laika also happened in the late 1950s.

So in a sense, no air in space was confirmed in the 1950s, but it was expected given what we (as humanity) knew from the 1600s.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

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Answer 6

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Answer 7

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Answer 8

one guy went up, took his helmet off, and went “Nope”, then quickly suffocated. that guys name? – Richard Simmons. …and thats why we dont hear anything from him anymore.

Answer 9

Interestingly, while people are talking about 17th century discussions of pressure and the like, as far back as the ancient Greeks agreed that what was out in space wasn’t “air.” They called it “aether,” and decided that that was why planets orbited the way that they did.

So “you can’t breathe in space” is actually an idea that goes back thousands of years.

Answer 10

[I believe they captured the moment in this documentary I saw.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86scPKqWFvc)