Emily Dickinson Lexicon

TOR-RI-CEL'LI-AN, a.

Pertaining to Torricelli, an Italian philosopher and mathematician, who discovered the true principle on which the barometer is constructed. Torricellian tube, is a glass tube thirty or more inches in length, open at one end, and hermetically sealed at the other. Torricellian vacuum, a vacuum produced by filling a tube with mercury, and allowing it to descend till it is counterbalanced by the weight of an equal column of the atmosphere, as in the barometer.