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Star (Christchurch), Issue 5761, 4 January 1897, Page 3

The telegraph service of the United Kingdom transmits on the average 1,538,270 words a day to newspapers alone. A statistician has learned that the annual aggregate circulation of the papers of the world is calculated to be 12,000,000,000 copies. To grasp any idea of this magnitude we may state that it .would cover no fewer than 10,450 square miles of surface, that it is printed on 781,250 tons of paper, and, further, that if the number 12,000,000,000 represented, instead of copies, seconds, it would take over 333 years for them to elapse. In lieu of this arrangement we might press and pile them vertically upward to gradually reach our highest mountains. Topping all these and even the highest Alps, the pile would reach the magnificent altitude of 490, or, in round numbers, 500 miles. Calculating that the average man spends five minutes reading his paper in the day (this is a very low estimate), we find that the people of the world altoeethor annually ; occupy time equivalent to 100,000 years reading the papers.