page_title: Siphon
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Siphon / History
caption_attribution_description: English: A diagram of Pascal's siphon, using some elements of en:File:SiphonNoTensileStrengthNeeded.svg for consistency in style across article.
context_page_description: A siphon is any of a wide variety of devices that involve the flow of liquids through tubes. In a narrower sense, the word refers particularly to a tube in an inverted "U" shape, which causes a liquid to flow upward, above the surface of a reservoir, with no pump, but powered by the fall of the liquid as it flows down the tube under the pull of gravity, then discharging at a level lower than the surface of the reservoir from which it came.
  There are two leading theories about how siphons cause liquid to flow uphill, against gravity, without being pumped, and powered only by gravity. The traditional theory for centuries was that gravity pulling the liquid down on the exit side of the siphon resulted in reduced pressure at the top of the siphon. Then atmospheric pressure was able to push the liquid from the upper reservoir, up into the reduced pressure at the top of the siphon, like in a barometer or drinking straw, and then over. However, it has been demonstrated that siphons can operate in a vacuum and to heights exceeding the barometric height of the liquid.
context_section_description: Egyptian reliefs from 1500 BC depict siphons used to extract liquids from large storage jars.
  There is physical evidence for the use of siphons by Greeks is the Justice cup of Pythagoras in Samos 6ed century BC and by Greek engineers in the 3rd century BC at Pergamon.
  Hero of Alexandria wrote extensively about siphons in the treatise Pneumatica.
  The Banu Musa brothers of 9th-century Baghdad invented a double-concentric siphon, which they described in their Book of Ingenious Devices. The edition edited by Hill includes an analysis of the double-concentric siphon.
  Siphons were studied further in the 17th century, in the context of suction pumps (and the recently developed vacuum pumps), particularly with an eye to understanding the maximum height of pumps (and siphons) and the apparent vacuum at the top of early barometers. This was initially explained by Galileo Galilei via the theory of horror vacui ("nature abhors a vacuum"), which dates to Aristotle, and which Galileo restated as resintenza del vacuo, but this was subsequently disproved by later workers, notably Evangelista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal – see barometer: history.
caption: Pascal's siphon, showing two beakers of mercury inside a container of water, demonstrating that a siphon works by atmospheric pressure, not that "nature abhors a vacuum"
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