FIGURING IT OUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 19, 3 November 1939, Page 11

FIGURING IT OUT

Our Tame Statistician Goes To Work On The Exhibition

From the small boy who, on receiving his Christmas present, confronts the abject figure of father in vivid red dressing gown and cottonwool beard with "How much did it cost?" to the engineer who measures distances by the thousandth of an inch, everyone is interested in figures, Figures-statistics-are something nice and tangible, a peg to hang the argumentative hat upon. Journalists, being no less and generally more prying and curious by disposition and necessity than other people, revel in a fat parcel of facts. So, as we strolled through the Exhibition the other day, we became curious to know some of the more out-of-the-way points about the construction of the place, N April 27, 1938, the first peg of the O Exhibition was driven. In 18 months, what had been a rubbish tip flanked by sand dunes grew to a city within a city. There have been 800 workers engaged on the job. Grading and levelling the rough, lupin-bedecked site took eight months. During the course of operations, 30,000 cubic yards of earth were moved. This cost £60,000. The timber framework for the buildings, which cover 15 acres, was constructed in 88 working days. This entailed the erection of 1,500 supporting columns, 70,000 piles and 12,000 trusses. As may be seen, the figures already grow to astronomical proportions. Six boring and cutting machines, working night and day in the special factory in the grounds, prepared 4,000 superficial feet of timber a day. : The Tower in the Wind Dominating the scene as the visitor enters the main gates of the Exhibition is the tower. It is natural that it should be dominating, since it is 155 feet high with a 20 foot flagpole above that. To take the weight of the tower’s 7,000 tons, a base of 300 cubic yards of concrete was made. Herewith a word for the jittery: a ninety-mile-an-hour gale, tearing through the grounds when the tower was in its embryonic stages, failed to make it quiver more than an inch or two. "Exhibition Feet " One thing that convinces us that 7 o’clock morning exercises are a Good Thing is the oor showing our physique made when ex- ~ posed to the rigours of Exhibition touring; we were told that if one walks along all the _ corridors one has made a four-hour journey _ of 14 miles. The remark astonished us, but having consulted our aching feet we knew that it was true-every word. No visitor to the Exhibition in his right mind would, of course, attempt to walk all 14 miles at once; but with noses to the ground, as it were, we

stuck it out, and found for our pains other interesting facts. Red crushed brick has been spread over 80,000 square yards. Underground there are 12 miles of drainage pipes and scores of miles of water piping. To cover the buildings, 15,000 gallons of paint were needed. There are 60,000 square feet of glass in the buildings, and the windows of the Australian Court are the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere -the plate glass over the main door being 1,125 square feet and the facade of the composite window being 2,520 square feet. More About Feet For the outer walls of the buildings, 700,000 square feet of asbestos were used, and the roofing required 650,000 square feet of malthoid. The lagoons were created by the excavation of 10,000 cubic yards of soil. In the buildings are 10,000,000 feet of New Zealand timber, and more than 1,500,000 feet of Oregon timber. In fact (although we have an idea it wouldn’t work in practice), if all the timber were put into a plank twelve inches wide and one-inch thick, you could walk from Wellington to Sydney and 400 miles north of that city on itl Water, Water! In the Dominion Court are two waterfalls-one a model of Kerikeri Falls and one of Bowen Falls. Over each, it is estimated 56,000,000 gallons of water will cascade in the six months of the Exhibition. The

reflecting lagoons in the grounds contain 320,000 gallons of water. The amusement park is the largest ever built in the Southern Hemisphere. Extending over ten acres it has, among many other attractions, a giant cyclone roller coaster with a track 3,000 feet long; in the children’s play area is a miniature railway with a half-mile track. Illuminating Facts At night, 40,000 globes will illuminate proceedings, aided and abetted by three miles of fluorescent tubing. For exterior lighting the total load is 1,000,000 watts. There are 26 sub-stations in the Exhibition; and while the total load for the Dunedin 1924-25 Exhibition was 1,500 kilowatts, the load for Wellington Exhibition will be 5,000 kilowatts. The stranded wire cable used is equivalent to 2,233 miles of ordinary house wiring. The electrical installation at the Exhibition would service a city of 25,000 people, Hammering It Home There are 200,000 bolts in the buildings, and this number does not include 90,000 alligator fasteners for holding timber together. We could tell you the number of nails used but you can work it out for yourself. First, take a pair of scales and a 2%-inch nail, find what the nail weighs, and divide the answer into 400 tons. That should get you really interested. Taking an average of four bangs to each nail, you can work out how many bangs made the Exhibition. As a piéce de resistance you can work out, on the basis of one in a hundred hammer blows landing on the workmen’s thumbs instead of on the nails, how many acres of sticking-plaster would Pprobably . . . and so on, ad infinitum. And if you're still about and asking for more, you can work out the one thing we didn’t try to dis-cover-how many pounds of air pressure will be exerted by bandsmen in the six months of the big showl pasar hi i aa "nena a Si