Submitted by bengy5959 t3_xz2esu in askscience
Could you lift a house with a sufficiently large hydraulic cylinder and a small hydraulic pump? If hydraulic force is just pressure times surface area of the cylinder, what happens as you increase the size of the cylinder? Does that put more force back on the pump until it breaks?
kilotesla t1_irkbrj8 wrote
Note that for a piston to sit securely in a cylinder without tipping, it has to be sufficiently long compared to the diameter of the cylinder. If you start making huge diameter pistons, you'll need them to be long, too. The volume of the piston would become huge, and it would be heavy and expensive. And hard to fit where you need it.
That might mean that you'd want many moderate size pistons instead of one giant one to lift a house. You could pipe them all the the same pump, and you wouldn't need any extra pressure because of the many pistons connected, assuming they are plumbed in parallel. You'd just need many pump strokes to move them a significant distance.