A CURIOUS CALCULATION.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17469, 1 June 1922, Page 9

A CURIOUS CALCULATION.

The following,V from "Novelties and Curiosities" for the year 1863, is interesting :—"The simple interest of ono cent at 6 per cent, per annum from the commencement of tho Christian era to the close of the year 1863 would be but tho trifling sum of little over £3; but if the same principal, at tho same rate and time, had been allowed to accumulate at compound interest, it would require the enormous number of 84,840 billions of globes of solid gold, each equal to the earth in magnitude, to pay the interest: and if the sum were equally divided among tho inhabitants of the earth, estimated at 1.000,000,000, every man, woman, and child would receive 84,840 golden worlds for an inheritance. Were all these globes placed side by side in a direct line, it would take lightning itself, which can girdles the earth in the wink of an eye, 73,000 years to travel from end to end. And if a Parrot gun wero discharged at one extremity, while a man was stationed at the other—light travelling 192,(300 miles in a second, tho initial velocity of a camion ball being 1500 ft a second, and sound moving through the atmosphere 1120 ft in a second—ho would see the flash after waiting 110,000 years; the ball would reach him in 74 billions of years; but he would not hear the report till the end of. 1000 millions of centuries. Again, if all these masses of gold were fused into one prodigious ball, having the sun for its centre, it would reach out into space., in all directions, 1732 millions of miles, almost reaching the orbit of Herschel or Uranus. And if the interest wero continued till the end of the present century, it would entirely fill up the solar system, and even encroach 500 millions of miles on the domains of the void beyond tho planet Neptune, whose orbit, at the distance of 2350 millions of miles from the sun, encircles our wnole system of worlds."