Horsepower fails in face of the atmosphere
Otto von Guericke’s Experimenta nova (ut vocantur) magdeburgica de vacuo spatio… of 1672 describes the experiments in which he produced an air pump able to create a vacuum and thus demonstrate the pressure exerted by our atmosphere.
A first account had been published 15 years earlier by Caspar Schott, but this is von Guericke’s f…