An experiment with Saxon bowls

To introduce our first-semester physics students to some basic analytic methods, we integrate a bit of history and a unique timing device into our lab. The story is that the Saxons placed a bowl with a hole in its bottom in water and used the time it took the bowl to submerge to limit orations. (A famous Greek prostitute also used such bowls to allocate her customer’s time, an example we do not use in class.) We have our students find a relationship between the diameter of the hole and the time till submergence. Though the original Saxon bowls varied both in hole size and bowl size, for simplicity we vary only the size of the hole.