In New York City's Bronx Zoo, Superintendent Quentin Schubert and Executive Secretary John Tee-Van pondered the problem of how to weigh Pete, a 43-year-old hippopotamus. Scales were obviously out of the question. Suddenly they remembered Archimedes.
His principle*made it all easy. In the hippo's tank they rigged up a contraption consisting of a hollow tube (stuck vertically in the water) enclosing a float attached to a moving arm arranged to swing around a marked scale. (On the basis of Archimedes' principle, the markings had been calibrated to register the weight of the water displaced, easily calculated from water's known weight by volume:...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
