Thursday, October 10, 2024

🌀📦 ⚙️

I actually made a “hurricane machine,” back in elementary school. It used a hot plate to heat a pan of water. The pan sat in the middle of a box with adjustable glass sides. The top held 4 light bulbs for more heat (old incandescent bulbs, mind), and a stove pipe for convection.

It worked: created a spiral of steam up through the stove pipe.

So you can “make “ a hurricane. Although it would take more energy than we can currently generate. And all I could control was the spin, by adjusting the glass sides to rotate the column clockwise, or counter clockwise.

So all we’d need is a really big box….


I remember reading something like that in the World Book Encyclopedia that accounts for a lot of my earliest education, only I remember dry ice being part of it so I in my rural isolation couldn't have done it
If  memory serves, that’s where I got the plans. It definitely used a hot plate, because I set it up on rug in the den and burned a spot on the rug from the bottom of the hot plate. The whole contraption was disassembled, retired to the attic, and eventually discarded. It was pretty much a one hit wonder. Watching it work once was all anyone needed.

1 comment:

  1. I remember reading something like that in the World Book Encyclopedia that accounts for a lot of my earliest education, only I remember dry ice being part of it so I in my rural isolation couldn't have done it. A lot of people would be surprised at how close the Pitch-Bot gets to how so many people conceive of scientific proof, many of them fully credentialed by many of our most prestigious universities and colleges.

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