A million dollars is a lot of money, but have you ever wondered how high a stack of one million dollar bills would be?
To answer this question we must first determine the thickness of a single dollar bill. We can make this measurement with a dial caliper:
With this measuring tool it is easy to determine that a dollar bill is very close to 0.004 inches thick. A stack of one million of these would be 0.004 times 1,000,000 or 4,000 inches tall. To convert inches to feet, divide by 12. 4000 divided by 12 is slightly over 333 feet. Wow, that's more than the length of a football field! A football filed is only 100 yards or 300 feet.
A billion is a thousand million. If a stack of a million dollars is 333 feet high, then a stack one thousand times this would be 333,000 feet. To find how high this is in miles simply divide by 5280, the number of feet in a mile. The answer may surprise you. A stack of a billion one dollar bills would reach over 63 miles high!
If you listen to the news you sometimes hear the word trillion used in connection to the national debt. A trillion is 1000 billions. That stack would be 1000 times as high as a billion, or 63,000 miles. A stack that tall would circle the earth more than 2 and a half times!
You might ask how many trees does it take to make a million dollars? The answer is not a single one. Paper money is made from cotton fiber, not from wood pulp.So if you ever wondered, money doesn't grow on trees, but if you poor choices, you could loose the shirt off your back.
Copyright 2021, William Johnson