Friday, June 15, 2007
An Urgent Question Regarding Property Prices
Okay, here's a question. It arises from Ford Madox Ford's The Soul of London. Writing in 1904, he said, '... the ground in front of the Mansion House is worth its area in sovereigns set on edge.' Can anybody calculate how many £1 coins set on edge would fill a square foot? Property prices in central London now start at £1,000 per square foot - I assume more than 1,000 coins could be stood in that space. But I just don't know and the demands of the day job make the experiment out of the question.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
It's 1310.
ReplyDeleteA pound coin is 3.15mm thick and 22.5mm in diameter, giving an area on edge of 70.9mm squared.
There are 92903 square mm in a square foot.92903 divided by 70.9 = 1310.
Raw data here:
http://www.unitconversion.org/area/square-millimeters-to-square-foots-conversion.html
and here:
http://www.royalmint.com/RoyalMint/web/site/Corporate/Corp_british_coinage/CoinDesign/OnePoundCoin.asp
Bryan and Chris,
ReplyDeletelooks like you have come across and invariant here! And who said property prices in London are now higher than ever? Looks like they are still a bargain compared to 1904.
Chances are Fordy just made that up - as he did most things. Nice idea though.
ReplyDeleteGood grief! Thanks, Chris. It looks like we may have handed Gordon Brown a vital new tool of economic policy. On the basis of this hitherto undiscovered correlation he can take the heat out of the London property market simply by thickening the pound coin.
ReplyDeleteI was able to determine that the diameter of the 1904 coin was 22mm and it weighed about 1.5 grams less than the current version. Not sure if this is because the 1904 version was thinner or because of the difference in metals.
ReplyDeleteYou've lost me here with all this high-faluting mathematics.
ReplyDeleteWhat does Ford Madox Ford mean when he refers to setting coins 'on edge'? Does he mean that the coins are placed face-down, with adjacent coins touching edge-to-edge, or does he mean that the coins should be placed upright, with their edges touching the ground?
A coin whose face is 22.5mm in diameter will have a facial surface area of 397.6mm squared.
Standing upright, Gordon.
ReplyDeleteOk. So if the diameter of a coin is 22.5mm, then the circumference of its edge will be pi x diameter, which comes to 70.7mm. If it's 3.15mm thick, then the surface area of the edge of a coin will be 3.15 x 70.7 = 222.6mm squared?
ReplyDeleteI see what Chris has done though: his 'area on edge' is simply 3.15 x 22.5, which is the area occupied by an upright coin when projected down onto the horizontal plane.
ReplyDeleteYou omitted the Einstein tensor, Gordon.
ReplyDeleteNow, you see, that's what distinguishes you from every other mainstream journalist: you actually know that there is something called the Einstein tensor!
ReplyDelete