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It was only the fact that Torricelli and Cavalcanti kept their grave eyes fixed upon him that restrained a wild outburst of his anger.
During the last three years of his life, his eminent pupil Viviani formed one of his family; and in October 1641, the celebrated Torricelli, another of his pupils, was admitted to the same distinction. Though the powerful mind of Galileo still retained its vigour, yet his debilitated frame was exhausted with mental labour.
As soon as the explanation of Torricelli was communicated to him, he accepted it without hesitation, and resolved to carry out a further series of experiments with the view of verifying this explanation, and of banishing for ever the scholastic nonsense of Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum.
In the seventeenth century the Tuscan and Papal Governments consulted Galileo, Torricelli, Castelli, Cassini, Viviani, and other distinguished philosophers and engineers, on the possibility of reclaiming the valley by a regular artificial drainage.
Without paying attention to his outcry, two gentlemen of dignified appearance Evangelista Torricelli and Andrea Cavalcanti took him by the arms, one on each side, and conducted him to a seat in front of the stage, taking their places on either side of him. No sooner were they seated than there entered on to the stage, Formica, as Pasquarello!
Before his time considerable progress had been made towards a knowledge of atmospheric pressure. Galileo and his pupil Torricelli had both been busy with the subject. To Pascal, however, remains the glory of carrying successfully to a conclusion the suggestion of Torricelli, and of verifying the results which he had indicated.
Galileo had observed that water will not rise in an exhausted tube, such as a pump, to a height greater than thirty-three feet, but he was never able to offer a satisfactory explanation of the principle. Torricelli was able to demonstrate that the height at which the water stood depended upon nothing but its weight as compared with the weight of air.
One of the most important of these was the Lyncean Society, founded about the year 1611, Galileo himself being a member. This society was succeeded by the Accademia del Cimento, at Florence, in 1657, which for a time flourished, with such a famous scientist as Torricelli as one of its members.
Pascal’s name was not indeed mentioned in these theses; but there could be no doubt of the allusion made to “certain persons loving novelty” who claimed to be the inventors of a definite experiment of which Torricelli was the real author.
Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the "Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same locality, and that storms and weather changes were indicated by a rising and falling of the column of mercury in the tube of the siphon-barometer.
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