How much empire state building weigh

Construction is more weight-conscious. Its foundation still reaches down feet into the soft soil below it. It's five times the height of the Great Pyramid, yet only a sixth the weight of the Pyramid.

Another comparison, by the way: The largest super tankers are just a bit shorter, and they weigh about the same, as the biggest skyscrapers. In any case, my magazine illustrations revel in massiveness. An artist shows Wall Street lined by twenty-story buildings with a clutter of horse-drawn vehicles on the crowded street below. It's a Hogarthian vision of where all this is going. Well, New York continued its upward reach; but it's pretty well cleaned up the streets below.

And we can only wonder at the millions of tons of iron now woven, out of sight, in the ground below it. I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. See the Wikipedia article on the Burj-Khalifa tower. Click here for audio of Episode Lienhard Click here for audio of Episode Today, we reinvent foundations.

Theme music F. Skinner, Foundations of Lofty Buildings. San Francisco, California and Marin County, California Post weight reduction; total weight of bridge, anchorage, and approaches Following the completion of the project to eliminate excess material, the total weight of the Golden Gate Bridge — including its anchorages and approaches — is , tonnes.

The two main cables in the spanning the bridge are spun out of a total of , km 80, mi of wire. La Tour CN , a. Canadian National Tower, a.

The Tower is home to the world's highest glass floor — a viewing area that allows visitors to look straight down m 1, ft to the ground below. Citations It's about thirteen-and-a-half times as heavy as The Statue of Liberty In other words, , tonnes is Liberty Enlightening the World, a. The statue was designed using an optical trick known as "forced perspective" to make the statue appear proportionally correct when viewed from its base and is, in actuality, disproportionately large at the top.

So, here are the various estimates: 1. There are 2. There are 2 pianos for every people. There are 50, pianos in Chicago. Pianos are tuned once a year. It takes 2 hours to tune a piano. Piano tuners work 2, hours a year. Add 15 percent to that number to account for travel time, meaning that there are approximately 58 piano tuners in Chicago. What is the real answer? The Yellow Pages for Chicago lists This includes some duplicates businesses with more than one phone number are listed twice , and the category includes piano and organ technicians who are not tuners.

Deduct 25 for these anomalies, and an estimate of 58 appears to be very close. Back to the Google interview and the Empire State Building question. If you were sitting in that interview chair, your interviewer would ask you to think out loud and walk her through your reasoning.

One way to start would be to estimate its size, and then estimate the weight based on that. For size I need to know height, length, and width. My boundary conditions are that it is between 50 and stories; 50 stories work out to being — feet tall 10—15 feet per story , and stories work out to be 1,—1, feet tall.

So my height estimate is between and 1, feet. Now for its footprint. How many uses can you come up with for a broomstick? A lemon? These are skills that can be nurtured beginning at a young age.

Most jobs require some degree of creativity and flexible thinking. If the building is square, it is x feet in its length x width. There are several ways to go from here. All rely on the fact that most of the building is empty—that is, it is hollow. The weight of the building is mostly in the walls and floors and ceilings. I imagine that the building is made of steel for the walls and some combination of steel and concrete for the floors.

The volume of the building is its footprint times its height. My footprint estimate above was 60, square feet. My height estimate was 1, feet. I could estimate the thickness of the walls and floors and estimate how much a cubic foot of the materials weighs and come up then with an estimate of the weight per story. Alternatively, I could set boundary conditions for the volume of the building.