The word barometer is derived from the Greek word "baros", meaning weight, and the Greek word

"metron", meaning measure. The barometer is an instrument used to measure air pressure. In early 17th
century Italy there were many Italian scientist independently working on the principal's of a vacuum and
air pressure, however, it was a young scientist by the name of Evangelista Torricelli that first detailed his
experiments with what became known as the barometer. The barometer utilizes the principal of a vacuum
to measure the weight of the air. For a simple explanation of a vacuum, just consider your everyday use
of a straw to sip water.
Your sucking, which removes the air out of the top of the straw, causes a vacuum near the top of the
straw, and with the help of the outside air pressure, the water rises within the straw to fill this partial
vacuum. Even if you stop sucking on the straw, the liquid will not fall as long as you maintain a seal of this
partial vacuum at the top of the straw. If you were strong enough to suck all the air out of the top of a very
long glass straw, to create a perfect vacuum at the top, the water would immediately rise to almost 35 feet
within this long straw, as the average outside air pressure, at sea level, could support 35 feet of water!
The first publicized working barometer, dating back to 1643, has been credited to Evangelista Torricelli.
Torricelli had been associated with, and studied the writings of Galileo, just before Galileo's untimely
death in 1642, and used those findings to help him construct the first barometer, which, at first used water
to measure the air pressure. Though Galileo is recognized as the first to experiment with a water type
vacuum apparatus in early 1642, his primary objective was to simply ratify the "vacuum theory", and he
did not extrapolate his findings to deduct that changes in the weather correspondingly caused air
pressure fluctuations. However, Galileo's vacuum principal was later to be instrumental in all barometers.