I still remember that when I was a small kid I saw one of these tornado machines in a science museum. The machine looked super mysterious and was fun to play with. Now, today is the day that I finally got to make one of these tornado machines myself. Turns out, they are way less mysterious than you’d think..

To build the machine there are two things that I need to achieve:

A tornado (duh..)
And something to make the tornado visible

For that last thing I chose to use water vapor created with ultrasonic foggers, another option for this would have been a smoke machine but I figured that the water vapor is a bit cleaner for use inside.

Then to make the tornado I’m using two fans: a blower fan in the bottom compartment to pressurize it and generate a rotary motion by blowing the air through the holes in the tube. And a regular axial fan to pull the air up creating a nice tornado.

These are the components I used: