Fun Fact about Air
If you put a cylinder around the Eiffel Tower just big enough to enclose it, the air inside the cylinder (from the surface to the “edge” of the atmosphere) will weigh more than the tower.
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If you put a cylinder around the Eiffel Tower just big enough to enclose it, the air inside the cylinder (from the surface to the “edge” of the atmosphere) will weigh more than the tower.
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Can you provide the numbers to prove this. I’m catching hell @ work for making that statement.
One place where this is mentioned is here: http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/documentation/structure/page/chiffres.html
The tower is 125 m on a side, and so 177 m diagonally. It is 312 m high (including the flag). This makes for a cylinder with a volume of 7.68e6 m^3. At standard ambient conditions, dry air has a density of 1.168 kg/m^3, for a total mass of 8.97e6 kg. The tower’s metal has a mass of 7.30e6 kg, less than the air needed to surround it.
To be sure, the density of air will be lower at the top of the tower than at the bottom, a fact not accounted for in these calculations. You can recalculate it yourself using the formulas here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_of_air