What Becomes of the Pins?
A London journal offered a prize of £2 2s. for a reasonable solution of “What becomes of the pins!” The following reply captured the ducats:
“A surface ten miles square contains 310,000,000 square yards. Assume this as the area of London. To include the area of floor surface in houses, it may safely be trebled—say 1,000,000,000 square yards. If every five square yards contained one stray pin, who would be aware of it? Here, then, we have in London alone a receptacle for 200,000,000 of stray pins unperceived by anybody. The answer, therefore, is that thousands of millions of lost pins can be, and are, scattered about the land unnoticed. Half of these, being out of doors, are gradually destroyed by rust; the other half pass out of doors by degrees.”