Same thing with the Pythagorean Cup siphon action. There you have it. It can be found on Amazon. Siphon away, and enjoy watching your greedy friends get punished. Don't miss a drop!
If the user was too greedy and poured wine over the designed threshold, the cup would spill its entire content. Imagine the dismay and stupefaction a glutton felt when his precious brew perished on the floor. Indeed, Pythagoras was always a professor at heart, and his contraption may have taught a couple of fellows about the virtue of moderation.
On the outside, the 2,year-old design looks like any other cup. However, when you make a cross-section, it becomes clear this is no ordinary vessel.
As the pipe curls over the top of the U-shaped central column, its floor marks an imaginary line. If you fill the cup over this horizontal line, the liquid will begin to siphon out the bottom and onto your lap or feet — the entire content of the cup, even the liquid below the line.
The siphon is created due to the interplay between gravity and hydrostatic pressure. Pythagoras lived between and BCE, and while there's no accurate date on when the cup was created, it's likely it first appeared sometime in the mid-6th Century BCE. According to one legend, Pythagoras created the cup to punish his peers who greedily over-filled their cups of wine. For this reason, the cup is often also referred to as a "Greedy Cup".
Other theories suggest that Pythagoras created the cup to remind people to drink in moderation. If the liquid in the cup sits below a certain level, you can drink quite comfortably from it. But if you pour above that level, it will all drain out. Whether it was intended to punish the greedy, or to serve as a reminder of drinking sensibly, it certainly made an impact.
The basic design of the Pythagorean Cup inspired jokers all around the world, and it remains a popular practical joke. Versions of the Pythagorean cup that date back as far as the 4th Century CE have been found by archaeologists, including Roman variations on the design.
The Roman " Tantalus Bowl " functions in much the same way as a Pythagorean Cup, with the addition of a small figurine of Tantalus - a figure from mythology who was unable to quench his thirst. In trying to drink from the bowl, the drinker effectively becomes just like Tantalus. Just goes to show that referencing popular stories for comedic effect is nothing new either. If you want to enjoy the grand, ancient tradition of making your friends spill their drinks all over themselves, you're in luck.
There are a number of ways you can mess around with Pythagorean Cups at home. Obviously, you could easily buy one from an online joke shop, but where's the fun in that? Why not try making a Pythagorean Cup of your own? There are a couple of options available when making your own cup. Provided the water level does not go above the upper part of the loop, it cannot escape out through the base. But if the cup is filled above the loop, it spills over on the inside and drains out of the bottom!
The surprising thing here, and what makes this a reasonable physics demonstration as well as a cute trick, is that the cup drains completely once the process is started. The unlucky drinker has created a siphon in their glass, the same process by which one can use a hose to drain a fuel tank, or ick a septic tank. It is a little more tricky to explain how a siphon works! As far as I know, however, the atmospheric pressure explanation sufficiently matches the observational evidence under most circumstances.
Do you want your own Pythagoras cup? As I have noted, you can purchase decorative ones on eBay directly from a Greek seller. You can purchase a clear one, showing clearly the inner workings of the device, from Acme Klein Bottles , which sells a lot of entertaining mathematical glassware including, obviously, Klein bottles.
The packaging of the cup includes a lot of great mathematical humor and is almost worth the price of purchase all by itself! I think the cup in your sketches would not drain completely, though — only down to the level of the intake for the tube. Yes, I should have drawn the intake a little lower on my picture.
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