EXPERIMENT 9. Lay a rubber tube flat in the bottom of a pan of
water, so that the tube will be filled with water. Let one end
stay under water, but pinch the other end tightly shut with
your thumb and finger and lift it out of the pan. Lower this
closed end into a sink or empty pan that is lower than the
pan of water. Now stop pinching the tube shut. This device is
called a _siphon_ (Fig. 8).
EXPERIMENT 10. Put the mouth of a small syringe, or better, of
a glass model lift pump, under water. Draw the handle up. Does
the water follow the plunger up, stand still, or go down in
the pump?
When you pull up the plunger, you leave an empty space; you shove the
air out of the pump or syringe ahead of the plunger. The air outside,
pressing on the water, forces it up into this empty space from which
the air has been pushed. But air pressure cannot force water up even
into a perfect vacuum farther than about 33 feet. If your glass pump
were, say, 40 feet long, the water would follow the plunger up for a
little over 30 feet, but nothing could suck it higher; for by the time
it reaches that height it is pushing down with its own weight as hard
as the air is pressing on the water below. No suction pump, or siphon,
however perfect, will ever lift water more than about 33 feet, and
it will do well if it draws water up 28 or 30 feet. This is because a
perfect vacuum cannot be made. There is always some water vapor formed
by the water evaporating a little, and there is always a small amount
of air that has been dissolved in water, both of which partly fill the
space above the water and press down a little on the water within the
pump.
[Illustration: FIG. 9. A glass model suction pump.]
If you had a straw over 33 feet long, and if some one held a glass of
lemonade for you down near the sidewalk while you leaned over from
the roof of a three-story building with your long straw, you could
not possibly drink the lemonade. The air pressure would not be great
enough to lift it so high, no matter how hard you sucked,--that is, no
matter how perfect a vacuum you made in the upper part of the straw.
The lemonade would rise part way, and then your straw would be
flattened by the pressure outside.
Some days the air can force water up farther in a tube than it can
on other days. If it can force the water up 33 feet today, it will
perhaps be able to force it up only 30 feet immediately before a
storm. And if it forces water up 33 feet at sea level, it may force it
up only 15 or 20 feet on a high mountain, for on a mountain there
is much less air above to make pressure. The pressure of the air is
different in different places; where the air is heavy and pressing
hard, we say the pressure is _high_; where the air is light and not
pressing so hard, we call the pressure _low_. A place where the air is
heavy is called an area of high pressure; where it is light, an area
of low pressure. (See Section 44.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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