Things we used to believe about air...
And....breathe. Kind of vital, air, isn’t it? But what is it? Or what did we used to believe it was? Jake Yapp discovered some surprising things that very clever people used to think was true of a substance that is around us all the time.
In 450BC, air was believed to be a combination of aer and aether, aether being the bright upper atmosphere above the clouds.
Ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles placed a bucket upside down in water and realised that the water could not get in, thus identifying air as a “thing” that was filling the bucketm rather than... well, nothing.
Empedocles ended his life by jumping into a volcano, believing he would come back as a god. Instead the volcano chucked one of his bronze sandals back out again.
Aristotle described air as hot and wet. Well he did live in Greece.
Plato thought there were different types of air, the brightest being aether and the ‘muddiest’ being mist and darkness.
In 1774 Joseph Priestley, an English theologian, realised air was a mixture of gases. He isolated oxygen and breathed it in, after he’d tested the process on some mice.
Priestley also invented the rubber eraser.
The theory that every breath of air may contain an atom of the last breath of Caesar’s is mathematically possible but highly unlikely....and also undesirable. You’ll have to watch the video to find out why....
Air
The history of everything we ever thought we knew about air, in four minutes.
