Some inventions are glamorous—microchips and fiber-optic cables spring to mind. Others are quieter and more humble, but no less important. Pumps and compressors certainly fall into that category. Try to picture life without them and you won't get very far. Take away pumps and you'll have nothing to push hot water through your home central-heating pipes, and no way to remove the heat from your refrigerator. Might as well start walking too, because you won't be able to blow up the tires on your bicycle or put gasoline in your car. From jackhammers to air conditioners, all kinds of machines use pumps and compressors to move liquids and gases from place to place. Let's take a closer look at how they work!
Suppose you want to move a solid block of metal. There's little choice in how to go about it: you have to pick it up and carry it. But if you want to move liquids or gases, things are a whole lot easier. That's because they move with only a little bit of help from us. We call liquids and gases fluids because they flow down channels and pipes from one place to another. They don't, however, move without some help. It takes energy to move things and usually we have to provide that ourselves. Sometimes liquids and gases do have stored potential energy that they can use to move themselves (for example, rivers flow downhill from source to sea by using the force of gravity), but often we want to move them to places where they wouldn't normally go—and for that we need pumps and compressors.
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