[1770] in Humor
HUMOR: Useless fact of the day
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew Bennett)
Tue Dec 17 17:09:49 1996
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 16:55:27 -0500
To: humor@MIT.EDU
From: abennett@MIT.EDU (Andrew Bennett)
To: abennett@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 14:47:05 EST
From: "Andrew Marc Greene" <amgreene@MIT.EDU>
Sender: amgreene@MIT.EDU
How long would a Slinky(R) be if you were to completely stretch it?
My sample Slinky(R) was wound 83 times around, and had an outer
diameter of 72.0mm. The width of the metal band was 2.0mm, so the
mean diameter of the Slinky(R) was 70.0mm.
That means that the circumfrence is approx 220mm, which we multiply
by 83 to get a total length of 18.6m.
But this is a helix, not just a bunch of circles, and we need to
account for that. The Slinky(R) is 57mm tall when collapsed, and has
(as we stated above) 83 circles, for a material width of .69mm.
However, the maximum additional length that this could provide is
that same 57mm, which is less than the error in our calculation of
18.6m -- so, we can ignore it.
Therefore, if you took a Slinky(R) and stretched it out completely,
it would be about 18.6m long (or about 60 ft).
