Bored? Here’s how you can make water flow in a zigzag using common home technologies

Here’s a fun project that you can do at home to impress your friends or kids on the weekend. All you need is a speaker, rubber hose, water source, tone-generating software, and a 24-frames-per-second-capable camera. 

Using these common household technologies together will allow you to record water flow in a zigzag so it seems as if the drops are being suspended in space.

This project comes from YouTube’r brusspup, who explains on his channel (summarized here) how it all works: the tone-generating software is used to produce a sound of 24 Hz through the speakers. As this sound is released, the hose — positioned atop the speaker — begins to release water out and in front of the speaker. Due to its positioning, the hose is being vibrated by the hose at a rate of about 24 times per second.

Now, to anyone standing next to it, the actual movement of the hose is a blur, but to a camera recording 24 shots per second, the video ends up looking as if the water is frozen in space. 

Adjust the frequency up a bit and the water starts to look like it’s falling very, very slowly. This is because the shaking now occurs, say, once every 0.04 seconds instead of 0.0417. This results in the drops now moving at 4% of their real speed. 

To have some fun and show off a bit, make the frequency slightly lower than the required speed. What this will do is make it look like the water’s actually moving upwards. It’s a simple trick and referred to as the “wagon-wheel effect” after the way wheels in Westerns look like they’re rotating the wrong way when they’re moving more than half-way round between frames.

Here’s the polished version of the experiment from Brusspup’s YouTube channel:

And a more basic attempt can be seen here:

Via the brusspup channel