From around 1550-1700 extreme developments and questioning materialized in Europe. Today, this period of time is known as the Scientific Revolution. While many of whom were credited with new discoveries around this time, philosophers began to question what was previously known to be true. As new findings were being made so were new technologies, and not only were these advancements in of themselves, but they also aided introducing future technology. This domino effect created by changes in the way people looked at science and technology lead to major scientific discoveries in history.

The imbalance and change in one area or another proved helpful to propel innovations. Science and technology benefit from each other, therefore moving both forward. This way of thinking, learning, questioning, and discovering was prominent during the Scientific Revolution. Galileo Galilei and Evangelista Torricelli were two that were helping create this domino effect of advancement. For hundreds of years, It had been known that water pumps could not lift water past a certain point. The distance water could not be pumped beyond was found to be around 34 feet. However, this height varied because it is based of the weight of the air, and was what Europeans like Galileo and Torricelli were trying to discover. In 1640 Galileo and Torricelli conducted an experiment together with a suction pump at a well. They lowered the tube into the well and began to pump water as high as they could, but found that no matter their efforts the water could not pass more than about 34 feet about the water’s surface. Galileo concluded that, in fact, they were not pumping the water up the tube at all, but rather removing air from the pump creating a vacuum. This new thinking led one of Torricelli’s greatest inventions, the first barometer. Torricelli saw that air pressure was what caused water to rise in a pump, thus he created the barometer to measure air pressure. The first barometer made was a glass tube filled with mercury, with both ends sealed, and one end of the tube dipped in mercury. Torricelli observed that the height of the mercury changed, which he concluded was the air pressure changing.

The time period cited as the Scientific Revolution in Europe proved to be a fast forwarding era of advancement. There were many different occurrences of new discoveries in science and technology, but ones with relationships like Galileo’s pump experiment and Torricelli’s barometer are ones that shaped advancement not only during the Scientific Revolution but for centuries after and into today.