Blood pressure and a water-column analogy

The “fourth floor” figure is not an accurate description of how the heart works. For scale, a systolic pressure of 120 mmHg is about 16 kPa; if converted to the hydrostatic pressure of a static blood column, that is roughly 1.5 m. But blood circulates through a closed vascular system, so this comparison does not mean the heart can pump an open jet of blood to that height. The illustration is an AI-generated synthetic diagram.