How and when did humans discover there was no air in space?
In: 1574
We suspected it long before we were able to fly. We would have known from having to breath harder after traveling up mountains that there was less breathable air at altitude. What we didn’t know was how high the atmosphere actually extended.
One of the earliest flight experiments came shortly after the development of the hot air balloon in the late 1700s. Before the earliest aeronauts took to the skies, they sent a duck (a flying bird, known to be able to survive at altitude), a chicken (a flightless bird, but with an anatomy similar to a duck) and a sheep (a mammal, with physiology similar to that of a human). When all three survived their balloon flight, we knew that our atmosphere was thicker than we previously suspected.
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