Air compression

Click on this image to open a larger version. From the Royal Society archive.

A table by William, Lord Brouncker, the first President of the Royal Society and friend of Samuel Pepys, shows the compressibility of air at various depths underwater. Brouncker was an able mathematician: “profound” according to one contemporary, who worked on the classic problem of quadrature of the circle. In the course of his investigations he invented continued fractions.

Brouncker was also a Member of Parliament, so this image has been used to illustrate materials for the MP-Scientist Pairing scheme.