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Gas is one of the three phases and its properties include the ability to be
easily compressed, and theability to fill containers with odd shapes. A Flemish
physician named Jan Baptista Van Helmont was the first scientist to realize that
"air" was not an element, but actually a mixture of different gases.
This set the pace for an Italian physicist named Evangelista Torricelli who
determined that air exerts a pressure. This discovery led him to the creation of
the first barometer.
The first barometer was a long tube that was closed at one end and filled
with mercury and then inverted into a pool of mercury. From the barometer,
Torricelli notied that the mercury was always in the tube at around 760 mm. He
determined that this was due to the atomospheric pressure.
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