A calculation of the size of $crooges fortune

Sigvald Grøsfjeld jr. sigvald at duckburg.dk
Mon Aug 18 02:40:02 CEST 2003


Hi all!

I just recieved he following very interesting mail in my Yahoo-mail box:

Sigvald

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Scrooge McDuck -- How rich was he?
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Skip Newhall <x at sn.to> wrote:

> Hi --
>
> As a youngster in the 1940s, I was a super-fan
> of Donald Duck. I recall the claim that Scrooge
> McDuck was the world's richest being, having
> three cubic acres of money. Well, almost 60
> years later I decided to investigate the
> details. Here are my results:
>
> 1. An acre is a measure of area, so, strictly
> speaking, a cubic acre is a misuse of units
> and makes no sense. However, a reasonable
> interpretation of cubic acre is the volume of
> a cube, each of whose sides is one acre in
> area.
>
> 2. An acre is defined to be 43,560 square feet;
> therefore the side of a cubic acre is the
> square root of 43,560, or 208.71 feet.
>
> 3. The volume of a cube that is 208.71 feet
> on a side is 9,091,422 cubic feet. Therefore,
> three cubic acres is 27,274,265 cubic feet.
>
> 4. There are 1,728 (12 x 12 x 12) cubic inches
> in a cubic foot, so three cubic acres = 1,728
> x 27,274,265 = 47,129,930,540 cubic inches.
>
> 5. The dimensions of US currency are 6.14 by
> 2.61 by .0043 inches, giving a volume of .0689
> cubic inches per bill.
>
> 6. Three cubic acres will contain approximately
> 47,129,930,540/.0689 =
> 683,942,302,000 bills.
>
> 7. The six most common US currency
> denominations are $1, $5, $10, $20, $50, and
> $100. If we assume that Scrooge's money bin
> has equal amounts of each denomination, then
> the average is $31 per bill.
>
> 8. THEREFORE, Scrooge's official wealth is 31 x
> 683,942,302,000, or $21.2 trillion. And,
> allowing a factor of ten for inflation to
> today's dollars, his fortune would be around
> $210 trillion.
>
> - Bill Gates, eat your heart out!!
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Skip Newhall
> Valencia, California


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