COMPOUND INTEREST.

Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 80, 1 October 1887, Page 1 (Supplement)

COMPOUND INTEREST.

We have come across the following information, compiled, it seems, in the year 1863 : " The simple interest of one halfpenny at 6 per cent, per annum from the commencement of the Christian era to the close of the year 1863 would be but the trifling sum of little over £3 ; but if the same principal, at the same rate and time, had been allowed to accumulate at compound interest it would require the enormous number of 84,840 billions of globes of solid gold, each equal to the earth in magnitude, to pay the interest ; and if the sum were equally divided among the inhabitants of the earth, estimated at one thousand millions, every man, woman and child would receiveß4,B4o billion golden worlds for an inheritance. Were all these globes placed side by side in a direct line, it would take lightning itself, which can girdle the earth in the wink of an eye, 73,000 years to travel from end to end. And if a Parrot gun were discharged at one extremity, while a man was stationed at the other— light travelling 192,000 miles in a second, the initial velocity of a canon-ball being 1,500 feet per second, and sound moving through the atmosphere 1,120 feet in a second — he would see the flash after waiting 1 10,000 years ; the ball would reach him in 74 billions of years; but he would not hear the report till the end of 1,000 millions of centuries. Again, if all these masses of gold were fused into one prodigiouß ball, having the sun for its centre, it | would reach out into space, in all directions, 1,732 millions of miles, almost reaching the orbit of Hersehel or Uranus. And if the interest were continued till the end of the presont century, it would entirely fill up the Solar system, and even encroach 500 millions of miles on the domains of the void beyond the planet Neptune, whose orbit, at the distance of 2,820 millions of miles from the sun, encircles our whole system of worlds.