BBC News – How tall can a Lego tower get?

By Ruth Alexander, BBC News

¿Qué altura puede alcanzar una Torre de LEGO?

Building Lego towers is a competitive business – this one in Prague, at 32.5m, may be the tallest to date – BBC News

It’s not just children who like to build towers with Lego - the internet is alive with discussion on how many Lego bricks, stacked one on top of the other, it would take to destroy the bottom brick. So what’s the answer?

There has been a burning debate on the social news website Reddit.

It’s a trivial question you might think, but one the Open University‘s engineering department has – at the request of the BBC‘s More or Less programme – fired up its labs to try to answer.

“It’s an exciting thing to do because it’s an entirely new question and new questions are always interesting,” says Dr Ian Johnston, an applied mathematician and lecturer in engineering.

Looking on the internet, he expected to find the answer, but was surprised to find only a lot of speculation.

Perhaps that’s because not everyone who has pondered the question has ready access to a hydraulic testing machine.

vía BBC News – How tall can a Lego tower get?.