Do Farts Really Travel at 10 Feet Per Second?

You've probably seen it online: farts have been "clocked" at 10 feet per second. It sounds scientific, specific, and perfectly shareable. There's just one problem—it's spectacularly wrong. The real speed? About 0.01 feet per second. That's 1,000 times slower than the viral claim.

So how did this myth achieve escape velocity?

The Origin Story

The 10 feet per second claim traces back to Jim Dawson's 1999 book Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart. On page 10, Dawson wrote that farts dart away "at a speed that's been clocked at ten feet per second." No study cited. No methodology explained. Just a number.

From there, the claim mutated into a "Fart Facts" list on mistupid.com, spread through message boards, and eventually appeared in an NBC News article about flatulence. That article became a superspreading event—suddenly, the claim had mainstream media credibility.

Here's the twist: several sites attributed the speed claim to a physician interviewed in that NBC article. But the doctor never mentioned velocity at all. Someone just tacked the factoid onto the end.

What Science Actually Shows

When researchers actually measured fart diffusion, they found speeds around 8 inches per minute—far cry from the mythical 10 feet per second. Hydrogen sulfide (the smelly component) clocked in at roughly 0.2 feet per second at best.

Why so slow? Air resistance, turbulence, and environmental factors. While the kinetic theory of gases suggests individual molecules could theoretically move at 243 meters per second at body temperature, that's in a vacuum. In reality, fart smell spreads primarily through environmental air currents, not initial expulsion velocity.

The Measurement Problem

Part of why the myth persists is that fart speed is genuinely hard to measure. Variables include:

• Gas composition (varies by diet and individual)
• Environmental air currents
• Temperature and humidity
• Whether you're measuring initial expulsion or smell diffusion

It's not exactly something that gets rigorous NIH funding.

Why We Believed It

The 10 feet per second claim had everything a viral fact needs: it's specific enough to sound researched, gross enough to be memorable, and just plausible enough not to trigger skepticism. Who's going to fact-check fart velocity?

Turns out, flatologists at the International Center for Exceptional Flatulence did—and found the claim off by three orders of magnitude. The real lesson? Even the silliest-sounding "facts" deserve scrutiny, especially when they lack sources.

So next time someone shares this gem at a party, you can drop the real knowledge: farts are slow, methodical travelers. They're not breaking any speed records—just clearing rooms.