The Twisted Garden Hose and the Myth of the Toilet Flush

If you have wrapped your head around why and how the U-shaped tube in the flow meter (described in my previous post) is twisted by the Coriolis force – here is a video of a simple experiment brought to my attention by the author of the quoted article on gyroscope physics:

You could also test it yourself using a garden hose!

Accidentally you can observe this phenomenon so clearly because the typical angular frequencies of manual rotation result in a rather strong Coriolis force – in contrast to other every day phenomena that are falsely attributed to the Coriolis force associated with the rotation of the earth.

It is often stated – and I even found this in lecture notes and text books – that the Coriolis force is accountable for the unambiguously different sense of rotation of vortices in water flowing down the sink of your bathtub or toilet: In the Northern hemisphere water should spin anti-clockwise, in the Southern hemisphere clockwise. Numerous articles debunk this as an urban legend – I pick a random one.

On principle the statement on the sense of rotation is correct as the rotation of hurricanes is impacted by the Coriolis force. But for toilet flushes and the like the effect is negligible compared to other random factors impacting the flow of water. As pointed out in this article the momentum of leaves thrown into a bowl of water at a location near the equator of the earth (often used in demonstrations of entertain tourists) do have more impact than the Coriolis force.

Near the equator the Coriolis force is nearly zero, or more precisely: Since it is both perpendicular to the velocity and the axis of rotation the Coriolis force would be directed perpendicular to the surface of the earth – but there is no component of the Coriolis force that would allow water to flow North-South or East-West. Thus very near the equator the force is infinitesimally small – much smaller than the forces acting on, say, middle European or Austrian bathtubs. And even with those the Coriolis force does not determine the spin of rotation unambiguously.

How to estimate this impact – and why can we observe the twist in the garden hose experiment?

The size of the acceleration due to the Coriolis force is

2 times (angular frequency [rad/s]) times (component of the velocity [m/s] perpendicular to the axis of rotation)

The angular frequency in radians per second is 2 Pi times the number of rotations per second. Thus the angular frequency of the rotation of the earth is about 0,0000727 radians per second. The frequency of the motion of the garden hose was rather several turns per second, thus about 1 radians per second.

Imagine a slice or volume element of water flowing in a sink or a garden hose: Assuming a similar speed with an order of magnitude of 1 meter per second. The Coriolis force differs by several orders of magnitude

• Bathtub vortex: 0,00015 m/s²
• Garden hose: 2 m/s²

On the other hand, the acceleration due to gravity is equal to 9,81 m/s².

The garden hose in the video moves under the influence of gravity – like a swing or pendulum – and the Coriolis force (The additional force due to motion of the hands of the experimenter is required to overcome friction). Since the Coriolis force is of the same order of magnitude as gravity you would expect some significant impact as the resulting force on every slice or volume element of water is the vector sum of the two.

It is also important to keep track of the origins of the components of the velocity:

The radial flow velocity (assumed to be about 1 m/s) in the hose is constant and simply dictated the by the pressure in the water line. There is no tangential flow velocity unless caused by the Coriolis force.

In case of the bath tub the assumed 1 m/s do not refer to the velocity of the tangential motion in the vortex, but to the radial velocity of the water flowing “down” the sink. The tangential velocity is what would be caused by the Coriolis force – ideally.

Any initial velocity is is subject to the initial conditions applied to the experiment.

Any random tangential component of the flow velocity in the vortex increases when the water flows down:

If there is a small initial rotation – a small velocity directed perpendicular to the symmetry axis of the flush – pronounced vortices will develop due to the conservation of angular momentum: As the radius of rotation decreases – dictated by the shape of the bathtub or toilet – angular frequency needs to increase to keep the angular momentum constant. Thus in your typical flush you see how a random and small disturbance is “amplified”.

However, if you would conduct such experiment very carefully and wait long enough for any disturbance to die out, you would actually see the vortices due to Coriolis force only.[*] I have now learned from Wikipedia that it was an Austrian physicist who published the first paper on this in 1908 – Ottokar Tumlirz. Here is the full-text of his German paper: Ein neuer physikalischer Beweis für die Achsendrehung der Erde.  (Link edited in 2017. In 2013 I haven’t found the full text but only the abstract).

Tumlirz calculated the vortices’ velocity of rotation and used the following setup to confirm his findings:

Holes in a cylindrical tube – which is open at the bottom – allow water to enter the tube radially. This is not your standard flush, but a setup built for preventing the amplification of tangential components in the flow. Due to the Coriolis force the flow lines are not straight lines, but slightly bent.

Tumlirz noted that the water must not flow with a speed not higher than about 1 mm per minute.

Edit, Oct 2, 2013: See Ernst Mach’s original account of Tumlirz’ experiment (who was Mach’s student)

Edit, June 3, 2015: Actually somebody did that careful experiment now – and observed the tiny effect just due to the Coriolis force, as Tumlirz. Follow-up post here.

Edit, Augist 2016: Stumbled upon another reference to an experiment done in 1962 and published in Nature (and filmed) – link added to the post from 2015.