This of itself was strange enough; but now the worthy burgomaster produced teams of horses, and harnessing them to either side of the hemispheres, attempted to pull the adhering brasses apart.

Five, ten, fifteen teams--thirty horses, in all--were attached; but pull and tug as they would they could not separate the firmly clasped hemispheres.

The enormous pressure of the atmosphere had been most strikingly demonstrated.
But it is one thing to demonstrate, another to convince; and many of the good people of Magdeburg shook their heads over this "devil's contrivance," and predicted that Heaven would punish the Herr Burgomaster, as indeed it had once by striking his house with lightning and injuring some of his infernal contrivances.

They predicted his future punishment, but they did not molest him, for to his fellow-citizens, who talked and laughed, drank and smoked with him, and knew him for the honest citizen that he was, he did not seem bewitched at all.

And so he lived and worked and added other facts to science, and his brass hemispheres were not destroyed by fanatical Inquisitors, but are still preserved in the royal library at Berlin.
In his experiments with his air-pump he discovered many things regarding the action of gases, among others, that animals cannot live in a vacuum.
He invented the anemoscope and the air-balance, and being thus enabled to weight the air and note the changes that preceded storms and calms, he was able still further to dumfound his wondering fellow-Magde-burgers by more or less accurate predictions about the weather.
Von Guericke did not accept Gilbert's theory that the earth was a great magnet, but in his experiments along lines similar to those pursued by Gilbert, he not only invented the first electrical machine, but discovered electrical attraction and repulsion.