The Misappliance Of Science

Previous legend || The Misappliance Of Science || Next legend

The Penny Drops

Debunked: A penny falling from the top of the Empire State Building in New York City will embed in the pavement, or kill you if it hits you, or any of several other destructive things.

There are a variety of ways to attack this legend: you can talk about physics and "assume the ESB is a perfect sphere" and whatever, you can talk about similar experimental situations where nothing even remotely close to the UL occured, or you can attack the legend with the reality and idiosyncratic facts of the ESB and what happens when folks drop their spare change off of it.

To deal with the actual dropping of an actual penny off the actual ESB, the folks at the ESB maintain that updrafts generally prevent small objects from reaching the street, and they land on one of the setback roofs. The electricians that maintain the lights on these roofs collect the change for themselves.

Cecil Adams has this page on the subject. AFU has generated some informative posts on the topic that can be found here. The Empire State Building maintains a home page here, but their FAQ entry on this is not easily linkable, being java or somesuch. Click the Visitor Information link, click the FAQ link which will open a new window, then click the Trivia link in the Visiting the Building section, and go to page 2. If there's a better way to link this entry, someone say something.

And in case anyone finds themselves overwhelmed with curiosity about pennies, and, say, how much space they take up, I can only recommend The Megapenny Project, where one learns, among other things, that it takes one trillion, eight hundred eighteen billion, six hundred twenty-four million pennies to equal the volume of the Empire State Building.

References:

• Urbandlegends.com on pennies from heaven
• Cecil Adams on pennies from the ESB
• Empire State Building homepage