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Galileo, bought some Dutch telescopes, claimed that he had invented them, and tried to sell them to the government. That didn't work out, so, in 1609, he started observing the stars and planets with one of his telescopes and was simply bowled over by what he saw. He saw, among other things, that the Earth and the other planets all seemed to revolve about the sun. One thing that Galileo did accomplish was to popularize the use of the telescope for observation of the stars. The modern science of Astronomy grew out of that simple application
Born: 30 April 1777 in Brunswick, Duchy of Brunswick (now Germany)
23. February 1855- Carl Friedrich Gauss dies at age 77 in Gottingen, Germany, of dropsy, an enlarged heart, and the effects of a carriage accident he suffered during the single day he ventured out of Gottingen in the last 20 years of his life. He was a child prodigy, achieving most of his fundamental breakthroughs by age 17.
On November 20, 1602, Otto Guericke was born as son of a patrician wealthy family resident for three centuries in Magdeburg. The mother, née Anna von Zweidorff, came from a similar family. Guericke family inherited extensive property both in the city and in the countryside around it. Guericke was a German natural philosopher and writer who also became the mayor of Magdeburg. Inspired by the work of Torricelli and Galileo, he tried to create a vacuum and invented the air pump. He devised the astonishing spectacle of two copper bowls (Magdeburg Hemispheres), which brought him fame in his own time. Here two large metal hemispheres were joined together with a gasket and evacuated; two teams of horses pulling in opposite directions were unable to separate them. Once air was readmitted, they fell apart. In 1654 a famous series of experiments were performed before Emperor Ferdinand III at Regensburg. Guericke placed the Magdeburg hemispheres forming a hollow sphere about 35.5 cm (14 inches) in diameter. After he had removed the air from the sphere, two teams of eight horses were unable to pull the bowls apart, even though they were held together only by the air around them. Thus the tremendous force that air pressure exerts was first demonstrated. He demonstrated his experiments in 1657 at the emperor's court in Vienna. In 1661 he also travelled to Berlin to demonstrate the experiment with the Magdeburg hemispheres to the German Elector Friedrich Wilhelm. A scaled-down version of the demonstration became standard in courses of natural philosophy. On May 11, 1686, the diplomat and scientist died at the age of 83.
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