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.

11 comments:

  1. It's 1310.
    A 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

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  2. Bryan and Chris,

    looks 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.

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  3. Chances are Fordy just made that up - as he did most things. Nice idea though.

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  4. Good 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.

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  5. I 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.

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  6. You've lost me here with all this high-faluting mathematics.

    What 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.

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  7. Ok. 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?

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  8. I 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.

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  9. You omitted the Einstein tensor, Gordon.

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  10. Now, you see, that's what distinguishes you from every other mainstream journalist: you actually know that there is something called the Einstein tensor!

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