How do vacuums work? - podcast episode cover

How do vacuums work?

Sep 27, 20132 min
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Episode description

If a balloon was filled by a vacuum -- rather than helium or air -- would it float? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn the science behind balloons and vacuum.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

All clouds are not created equal, So back up your photos, documents and music with Mosey by E m C, the most trusted name in cloud backup, get it today at Mosey dot com. That's m o z y dot com and save ten with promo code brain Stuff. Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, what a balloon filled with vacuum instead of helium float? At sea level? Air

weighs about one point to five grams per leader. A leader of helium, on the other hand, weighs about point one eight grams. If you weigh a one leader bottle filled with air and then weigh the same bottle filled with helium, it will weigh about one gram less. If the bottle itself weighed less than a gram, you couldn't weigh it at all because it would float. You would have to turn the scale upside down and put it

above the floating bottle to check its negative weight. Generally, a balloon has to be several leaders in size before that one gram per lead or weight difference of helium versus air is enough to overcome the way to the balloon itself and float. If you could somehow fill a one leader bottle with a vacuum, it would float even better. A perfect vacuum ways zero grams, So a leader of perfect vacuum ways zero grams, and that's point one eight

grams less than a leader of helium. The problem, of course, is that building a lightweight container that can hold a vacuum is not nearly as easy as building a container that can hold helium. The phrase nature of whores of vacuum sums it up nicely. If you could figure out a way to do it, however, you could be set your vacuum balloon would float even better than a helium balloon. Now that you don't need to have a perfect vacuum for this to work, any air that you take out

of the container helps a vacuum balloon to float. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Your photos, music and documents are irreplaceable. Protect them with Mosey by e m C, the most trusted name and cloud backup. Back up your files today and save ten percent with promo code. Brain stuff at Mosey dot com m o z y dot com

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