Thomas Enda Conlon

My involvement with Otto von Guericke was serendipitous. In 2006 my wife and I toured the cities of old East Germany whose names still have a resonance throughout Europe – Berlin, Dresden, Potsdam, Wittenberg, Magdeburg, Jena and Brandenburg. Magdeburg was then still in the process of reconstructing itself physically after the destruction of the war years and the subsequent period of neglect under Communism. Psychologically too, it appeared to be putting down roots to a more worthy past from which to draw nourishment for a better future. Otto von Guericke looms large in Magdeburg’s past as a figure with whom it can unabashedly identify and in whom it can justly take pride. By way of a souvenir of our visit, I bought a copy of the facsimile of the Experimenta Nova, originally published in 1672, and reproduced in 2002 for the 400th anniversary of von Guericke’s birth. While I, knew something about von Guericke from the Magdeburg hemispheres experiment from my schoolboy physics courses, this was the beginning of a more serious interest in von Guericke.

Personal interest would not, on its own, have been sufficient to write my book. Two other factors were indispensable. The first was the astonishing growth in the dissemination of information enabled through the internet which enabled me to obtain biographies of von Guericke from otherwise unknown German antiquarian booksellers. Information about many of the individuals, some prominent on the international stage and some just of local fame, with whom von Guericke had dealings could now be easily in the German language Wikipedia. The second factor was the even more useful development that Googlebooks had begun to make a vast amount of seventeenth-century source material freely available. I now had access to two books which have never been republished or translated from the original Latin and which provide vital background to von Guericke’s scientific life. These were the Mechanica Hydraulico-pneumatica and the Tecnica Curiosa of Fr. Kaspar Schott, the Jesuit priest whose writings first brought von Guericke to international attention These two factors made it possible to track down virtually all of von Guericke’s allusions and references.

Finally to engage with a figure like von Guericke one needs a modest amount of scientific background and some facility in reading the Latin and German sources material.

For full details of this book : Thinking about Nothing: Otto von Guericke and the Magdeburg Experiments on the Vacuum