AIR PRESSURE

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 47, Issue 2669, 13 September 1937, Page 8

AIR PRESSURE

SOME STRANGE FACTS. “If all the people in Europe talked at once the energy used would just run a motor cycle,” says Cyril Dalmaine in a book review. Take air pressure. As you read this article there’s a pressure of air on your back far greater than you could lift—l2o lb. A mile down in the sea the pressure on, say, an average-sized cod, is about 120 tons —the weight of a large railway engine, yet the cod, like you, feels

nothing. Glance round the room. The air in it weighs as much as a small woman. Feel your heart. Your blood may be pumping through it at the rate of eight gallons a minute. Compare with your kitchen tap, which only gives you an average of four gallons. One inch of the sun gives enough energy to run a 50 h.p. engine continuously.

Similarly, should you wish to boil a kettle of water on the moon, you’d leave it standing about in the sunlight and it would boil. So, probably, would you. . . .

You remember “Big Bertha” shell-

ing Paris from 76 miles away? Those shells, at the top of their course, reached a height of 24 miles I

Look at two. locomotives standing in a goods yard. Two inanimate objects, you may think. Not at all. They’re attracted to one another with “a force of gravity which is equal to the weight of a penny.”

Down we go, through London’s gravel, clay, sand, chalk, sandstones, grapite, iron, until we come to the vast raging furnaces of the earth’s interior. And there you would find heating power equivalent to the burning of some 800,000 tons of coal a second.