ARCHIMEDES AND HIS LEVER.

Woodville Examiner, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4627, 14 May 1915, Page 4 (Supplement)

ARCHIMEDES AND HIS LEVER.

Give me a fulcrum and a place on which to .stand and I will raise the earth fi om its place!'’ is a saying popularly attributed to Archimedes.” If (writes C. O. Randstrom in tho “Scientific American”) the required conditions were possible the feat might bo performed, but in addition to providing a fulcrum and a .place on which to stand, Archimedes would also have to be furnished a« indefinite lease of life. To raise the earth a height of one inch by the force which Archimedes would have been capable of exerting would take not only an extremely long lever, but an extremely long time, as can be readily shown. If the earth is 7926 miles in diameter, the volume is about 261,000,000,000 cubic inches, _or 05,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic feet, and if the density is 5.5 the weight per cubic foot would be about 31 -I pounds, which, multiplied by tho volume, would give as the weight of the cartli 13,209.600,000,000,000,000000,000 pounds. We shall assume, further, that Archimedes weighed 159 pounds, and that “ the place on which to stand'' was some distant star; then, if the fulcrum is one mile from the point of application of the lover to the earth, the length of the power-arm of the lever, or the distance of Archimedes’ “ standing place ” Would have to be 38,064,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. Now, if Archimedes should take hold of the end of the lever and apply his weight of 150 pounds to it, and should move off into space with the velocity of light, or 186,000 miles a second, it would take him 237,000 years to finish the job be proposed, so that now, nearly 2200 years after making the famous dictum, he would barely have started the undertaking. Should Archimedes, while flying through space at the above rate of speed, encounter tho -.atmosphere of some planet. The effect would he that of striking a solid, and he for an instant would perform the function of a swiftlymovin”- hammer with a very long handle.