PETER

(sighs)

I’d better start bailing.

RASKOL

(through the porthole)

Bailing is for chumps.

RASKOL (CONT’D.)

(showing the device)

If you knew enough about old boats to know what to pray for, this would be the answer to your prayers.

PETER

What is it?

RASKOL

It’s a jet pump.

PETER

It doesn’t have any moving parts.  How can it be a pump?

RASKOL

Give it here.

PETER

You’re putting her out of her misery?

RASKOL

(soberly)

Nope.  I’m bailing her out.

PETER

By filling her up?

RASKOL

Come here.

RASKOL (CONT’D.)

(dropping it in again)

Now come below.

PATTI

What a little sucker!

PETER

That’s amazing!  How does it work?

RASKOL

(drily)

Very well.

PETER

But I mean, what makes it work?

RASKOL

I don’t know.  It’s one of the great mysteries of life.

ANNOUNCER’S VOICE

Hey, kids! here’s the man with the atomic brain, Doctor Science!

DOCTOR SCIENCE

(wildly enthusiastic)

Today is fluid dynamics day! 

(blows across a piece of paper, which rises)

See that?  The paper rises when I blow across it!  Why the heck did that happen?  Blowing lowered the pressure above the paper, and the greater pressure below the paper pushed it up.  That’s Bernoulli’s principle!

(a picture of Bernoulli)

An airplane’s wing works the same way!

From one point of view, the wing is pushed up by the greater pressure below it, but from another point of view it is sucked up by the lower pressure above it.  Both are valid explanations! . . . But perhaps you disagree.  Perhaps you think I’m just “playing with words.”  Ha!  Take a look at this.

(displays this apparatus)

I blow into this tube . . .

(blows into left tube)

The balloon inflates, of course.

(allows it to deflate)

Now . . . I suck on the other tube.

(he does) 

And the balloon still inflates.  So, sucking is the same as blowing!

(shows a portrait of physicist G. B. Venturi)

Enter G. B. Venturi, Italian physicist, who discovered that the speed of a fluid flowing through a tube could be accelerated by introducing a tapering constriction into the flow path.  Wow!

(an animated diagram)

Bernoulli’s principle tells us that Venturi’s constriction will lower the fluid pressure, since an increase in velocity must lead to a decrease in pressure, and that’s how a jet pump works!  Water from an outside source enters under pressure.  As it passes through the throat section, its velocity increases and its pressure decreases.  Then, depending on your point of view, the lower pressure within the throat section sucks or the greater pressure outside the pump blows water from the bilge into the extractor inlet.  Finally, the drive water and the bilge water shoot out the other side.

PETER

Amazing.

You'll find more swell ideas from Candi Lee here.

Copyright © 2001 by Eric Kraft
Registered with the Writers Guild of America East in 2001 

The screenplay for Inflating a Dog is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this teleplay may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. 

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.