Of all the shit we’ve covered in Australia, there’s one heaping crap we haven’t covered yet, and we’ll plunge whatever depths we must to get to the bottom of this.
Today’s Moment of Science… did The Simpsons lie to me about the Australian toilet thing or nah?
What we now know as the Coriolis effect was suggested as early as the 1600s by Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli. It wasn’t a phenomenon he’d observed, but proposed as one way to determine if the planet was rotating. He hypothesized that if this was the case, being a spherical thing spinning on its axis, the equator would be moving significantly faster than the poles. From the inertia this gives to objects closer to the equator, a cannon aimed due north in the northern hemisphere would miss its target to the right. In the southern hemisphere, aiming at the south pole you would miss to the left.
Due to the non-epidemic of failed cannon fire, Riccioli concluded the planet wasn’t rotating.
Fortunately, the 1800s came along, and French mathematician Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis… didn’t quite sort this out either. Coriolis studied the transfer of energy in rotating systems, and it wouldn’t be until decades after his death in 1843 that his work started being referenced in meteorology.
We can see the effects of this inertial force in a lot of places. Hurricanes in the northern hemisphere spin counter-clockwise and typhoons in the southern hemisphere move clockwise. The Coriolis effect also influences vaguely important things like the jet stream. It also causes the occasional smart person to say something ridiculous about toilets.
So about the great Australian shitter.
The hurricane-to-toilet corollary almost seems plausible, but we’re talking about a force that’s mainly observable in the only natural phenomenon large enough to occasionally scare Floridians.
The direction a toilet drains has little to do with the part of the planet it’s in and significantly more to do with how the toilet’s designed. Fill up and drain the same sink or tub a dozen times, it could easily flip direction every time it drains from the mildest swish of the water.
I’d ask why we ever believed this, but we got this idea from an episode of The Simpsons warning that if we tried to verify the information, we would incur a $900 phone bill, have to figure out who the fuck the Australian prime minister is this week to apologize to them, and destroy the Australian ecosystem in the process, so.
This has been your Moment of Science, pretty sure the Great Australian Shitter is Pauline Hanson’s official title.
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