How and when did humans discover there was no air in space?
In: 1574
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.
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