Early observations of negative pressures in liquids

In 1661-62 Huygens discovered that liquid water could exist metastably at a pressure lower than the vapor pressure. At first Boyle could not reproduce the results, but following a visit to London made by Huygens in 1663, Boyle demonstrated that the mercury in a barometer could stick and support a tension of two atmospheres. This was still known in 1805 to Young and Laplace, who explained the phenomenon in terms of cohesion, but seems then to have been forgotten. Modern work on negative pressures starts with the independent rediscovery of the phenomenon several times starting in 1846, and it is now explained in terms of metastable regions of the equation of state.