In a well-ordered town, water is supplied to every house and can be
drawn from taps placed in the highest stories. These are fed by pipes
which lead from a cistern at the top of the house. This water is brought
from a large pipe, or =main=, in the street, by a smaller house-pipe,
which is often made to twist about in various directions before it
reaches the cistern at the top of the house into which it delivers the
water. If you followed the main, you would find that it took a long
course up and down, beneath the pavement of the streets, until at last
it reached the water-works. Here you would find that the main was
connected with a reservoir; and either this reservoir is at a greater
height than any of the cisterns into which the water is delivered, or
there is some means of pumping the water from it to that height on its
way to the main. Thus the reservoir, the main, and the house-pipe form
one immense =U=-tube, and the water in the house-pipe tends to rise to
the same level as that of the water in the reservoir, and hence flows
into the cistern when the supply-pipe is open.
28. =The Transference of Motion by Moving Water: the Momentum of Moving
Water.=
Suppose a wooden vat with a horizontal tap, the sectional area[3] of the
tube of which is one square inch, inserted close to the bottom, to be
filled with water up to 100 inches above the tap. Then supposing the tap
to be shut, the pressure upon its sectional area will be 25,250 grains,
or rather more than three pounds and a half—and there is the same
pressure on every square inch of the bottom of the vat.
Footnote 3:
The sectional area of a tube is the surface occupied by its cavity
when it is cut across. It would be represented by the surface of a
piece of cardboard, like the wad of a gun, just large enough to go
into the tube.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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