Travel in the Bernese Oberland

nevertheless, the air is eight hundred and forty times thinner and lighter than water; the scale of its mass compensates for everything. It has therefore been calculated that the pressure which the column of air of the ordinary atmosphere must necessarily exert at the seashore on the body of an adult human with a surface area of 14 square feet equals the weight of 31,033 pounds; and only the mass of air inside his body, as well as the uniform air pressure from all sides, preserves him from otherwise inevitably fatal consequences of this immense load *). Now, however, the density of the air decreases very significantly in the upper regions of its sphere, and the column that a person has to carry is obviously shortened by as many feet as he travels upward from the sea level. If one takes the barometer reading at the sea to be 28 inches — and at Lake Thun to be 26 inches, 5 lines — one has to carry only 29,366 pounds of air here. On the Riesen, where the barometer is 21 inches, 4 lines, the air column has sunk to 23,714 pounds; and on the Faulhorn, at a barometer reading of 20 inches, 7 lines, only 22,823 pounds remain **).

*) F. Sprengel’s Handbook of Pathology, Part 1, 3rd ed. Leipzig, 1802. p. 523 etc. Sprengel even assumes the air pressure, 200 feet above the sea surface, to be 35,000 to 40,000 pounds.

**) Cf. Schrader’s Outline of Experimental Natural Science, etc., 2nd ed. Hamburg, 1804. p. 183. “According to this very calculation,” it continues there, “the pressure of the air on the human body changes by 92 pounds for every line of barometric height.”