Boil Water at Room Temperature with 50 ft. of Hose and a Stairway

This was a fun quick experiment that makes a great physics demo about pressures and state-changes of matter. Everybody’s seen water boil on a stove, but at the University of Toledo’s Saturday Physics days when I was little, I once saw water boil in a vacuum chamber, and for some reason that stuck with me. A few weeks ago I got the idea to try to boil water at low pressure, not with a real mechanical vacuum pump, but by using a massive column of water as a sort of by-default vacuum generator. I used no heat