- [Narrator] This is an air pump from the 19th century.
It's a device that removes the air
inside the glass bell chamber,
creating a vacuum seal for doing experiments.
And, it's currently on display
in the space outside the gallery
where The Huntington's iconic portrait
of the Blue Boy typically hangs.
Although, he is not currently on view.
Instead, you'll find "A Portrait of a Young Gentleman"
by Kehinde Wiley.
We commissioned Wiley to paint a response
to our iconic Gainsborough portrait.
So, for the moment, Blue Boy himself
was free to travel on loan to the National Gallery,
visiting London again after a hundred year hiatus,
and the National Gallery
was kind enough to agree to a reciprocal loan.
And, that's why the air pump is there.
It's part of the exhibition, Science and the Sublime,
a masterpiece by Joseph Wright of Derby,
which combines 15 objects from the library and art collections
with the borrowed painting,
"An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump."
In the painting, an itinerant scientist
is demonstrating the nature of air
by putting a live bird inside a vacuum.
By removing the air from the glass chamber,
the bird will perish.
By letting the air back in, the bird survives.
- One of the great masterworks of the enlightenment,
one of the most significant paintings
on a history of science theme,
one of my favorite paintings,
which I first saw over a decade ago in London
at the National Gallery.
It stuck with me because experiments with the air pump
are perhaps the most important experiments done
related to physics in the 17th and early 18th century.
- [Narrator] There's a clue to the significance
that the artist places on the act
of witnessing an experiment with an air pump.
It's on the table, in the shadows of the candlelight,
two Magdeburg hemispheres.
They also appear on the open page of a rare book,
from the library's collection
that's displayed next to the painting.
It's Otto von Guericke's 1672 publication
documenting his development of the first air pump,
and the discoveries that it revealed.
- He creates what are known as Magdeburg hemispheres.
It's basically a copper globe
with two hemispheres that can be placed together
to create a ball of copper.
You place a seal between them,
so a pad of leather soaked in some kind of an oil,
and it creates a seal between the two.
You remove the air,
and even teams of horses
can't separate the hemispheres one from another.
So, when von Guericke does first do this experiment,
he does it multiple times.
And, most notably, as in the image,
which is shown in our exhibition,
it is before a group of dignitaries.
This is before the royalty of the Holy Roman empire,
but this was the book that was produced
under Otto von Guericke's eye that he used
to announce the discoveries that had been made
with the air pump,
and that really showed people
that this could be replicated elsewhere.
And, it really is a sumptuous volume
with this full page spread
of the depiction of experiment with the horses
pulling at the hemispheres in either direction.
And, it's showing a moment in time that actually occurred.
And, it's being used to communicate something particular
about how this experiment was really done
in front of people.
And, there were witnesses there.
They saw this really extraordinary thing happening,
with this phenomenon that is really strange,
and somewhat inexplicable,
by the current natural philosophy of the era
that dates back to the ancient world.
Showing experiments that people would've seen,
that would've been witnessed, I think was a...
Is a new technique in order to convince people
about particular things that were happening in nature.
So, I find it to be a really extraordinary moment
in the early modern era.
How do you go about convincing people
and building consensus on a question, for instance,
about whether or not vacuums can exist in nature.
In the 17th century,
you needed a consensus among gentlemen
and theirs were the opinions that mattered.
Today, things are different.
You build consensus among a particular group
of professionalized scientists,
but the question about how to convince people
of the importance of scientific discovery,
we are still faced with these questions.
Disinformation is still out there,
spreading your ideas even though we have the internet.
It's still profoundly difficult.
So, in that respect, there's just a great deal of overlap
between this earlier era
and what we experience today.