On November 20, 1602, Otto Gericke was born as son of a patrician family.
Otto Gericke attended the city school to learn read and write, and he was tought additional private lessons. At the age of 15, he entered the Faculty of Arts at the Leipzig University. At the age of 16, his parents moved him to Helmstedt to study jurisprudence at the Helmstedt University. He was there only briefly before the death of his father called him home. When Otto Gericke was 18 years old, his father died and in 1621 he went to Jena to study at the university there. To complete his studies, Otto Gericke studied in Leiden (Netherlands) in 1623.
In 1626, at the age of 24, Otto Guericke returned to Magdeburg and married shortly thereafter. In 1630, he became city contractor. After the destruction of Magdeburg in 1631, he drew up a map of the city for the Swedish authorities. In this capacity, and also in his capacity as a magistrate of the city, Guericke played a large role in its reconstruction, both its fortifications and its bridges over the Elbe.
Guericke was conducting several scientific experiments in his yard. He become interested in the atmosphere, thus he studied the work of Galileo and Torricelli. When he learned of the Torricellian experiment, he repeated it, made barometric forecasts of the weather based on systematic observations over a period of years, and proposed a network of stations to make systematic reports of the barometer and weather. He made a special barometer in which the column of mercury moved the arm of a man, which thus pointed out rising and falling pressure.
He made his first suction pump in 1647 and continued in the following years to work at improving it into a real air pump. In 1650 he invented the air pump, which he used to create a partial vacuum.
Otto von Guericke made several very spectacular experiments with his air pumps. He demonstrated his experiments in 1657 at the emperor’s court in Vienna. In 1661 he also travelled to Berlin to demonstrate the experiment.
Otto von Guericke in 1672 made a cylinder with a close fitting piston. This he strongly fixed in the vertical position. By a rope and pulley 20 men effortlessly raised the piston to the top of the cylinder.
He experimented with what we know to have been static electricity. In 1663 Otto von Guericke invented the first electric generator, which produced static electricity by applying friction in the machine. The generator was made of a large sulphur ball cast inside a glass globe, mounted on a shaft. The ball was rotated by means of a crank and a static electric spark was produced when a pad was rubbed agains the ball as it rotated. The globe could be removed and used as source for experiments with electricity.
Later editions increased the speed of the rotation with a belt and and rotating wheel. In 1672 he discovered that the electricity thus produced could cause the surface of the sulfur ball to glow; hence he became the first man to view electroluminescence. It was Guericke who noted that like charges repelled each other.
