JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2641

There are many posts on this blog about comparisons–the height of buildings in terms of units of the Titanic, the depths of oceans in terms of Eiffel Towers, and many others, all findable in the Display of Information series (located in the column of categories at right).  Today’s episode is an unusual double-display, as it depicts the amount of earth moved in constructing the Panama Canal in terms of how many Great Pyramids of Eygpt the earth would fill and how those pyramids would look if displayed in Manhattan.  This wonderful insight comes to us via the Scientific American for September 12, 1912, and shows the beginning of the line of 63 pyramids’ worth of excavated Panama Canal soil reaching from The Battery to Harlem. Bravo! (Just so you know that amount of dirt would also fill up about 1.1. billion donald trumps. And: if workers removed the Panama Canal dirt the way that the prisoners removed dirt from their escape tunnel in The Great Escape that it would take approximately 5 billion trips from the site to somewhere else to dump the dirt; even if you have 100,000 people working at the project a la John Sturges’ actors, it would still take 60,000 trips each.)

 I should point out that this is not the first time that a Great-Pyramid-in-a-U.S.-city image has appeared in this blog, this one being an illustration for building the structure in Detroit in 1908

And the rest of the delightful put-it-into-perspective-with-an-uncommon-object: