• Question: How do you get water to flow up hill???

    Asked by 459prdq34 to Noel, nina, Ivan, Gowthaman, Alice on 8 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Alice Selby

      Alice Selby answered on 8 Mar 2019:


      There needs to be another force that will overcome gravity. Sometimes this is with siphons and pressure systems, but we don’t know how they work exactly. I don’t know how it would be done on a large scale though – sorry.

      Great question.

    • Photo: Ivan Merrick

      Ivan Merrick answered on 11 Mar 2019:


      Great question. If you asked most people they would say use a pump. They would probably have in mind an electric driven pump. But you can go back thousands of years and we find example of how people got water to flow uphill. The best example come from ancient Egypt on the river Nile. The device they used we now call an Archimedes Screw. It consisted of a hollow tube, usually made from wood. One end was in the river and the other end on the bank of the river some feet above the ground. Down the centre of the tube they put a timber screw, exactly like a carpenters screw but made from wood. It stretched from the bottom to the top of the tube and the edge of the screw blade touched the sides of the tube. The top was connected to a wheel which when turned turned to screw and water traveled up the screw and out the top. It then fell into a channel or pipe and was carried away into the fields at the side of the river and watered the crops growing in the ground. The wheel could be turned by people or cattle.
      Try making this in school. You can use any material you like. It does not have to be wood

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