Planchette smiled again.
"In other words," he went on, with the mathematician's natural
stubborn propensity for logic, "in order to resist the force of the
incoming water, it would be necessary to exert, upon every part of the
large surface, a force equal to that brought into action in the
vertical column, but with this difference--if the column of liquid is
a foot in height, the thousand little columns of the wide surface will
only have a very slight elevating power.
"Now," said Planchette, as he gave a fillip to his bits of stick, "let
us replace this funny little apparatus by steel tubes of suitable
strength and dimensions; and if you cover the liquid surface of the
reservoir with a strong sliding plate of metal, and if to this metal
plate you oppose another, solid enough and strong enough to resist any
test; if, furthermore, you give me the power of continually adding
water to the volume of liquid contents by means of the little vertical
tube, the object fixed between the two solid metal plates must of
necessity yield to the tremendous crushing force which indefinitely
compresses it. The method of continually pouring in water through a
little tube, like the manner of communicating force through the volume
of the liquid to a small metal plate, is an absurdly primitive
mechanical device.
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