15 Feb Guy Lights Ball Of 42,000 Matches All At Once And It’s Utterly Glorious
In the last 365 days, I feel like I’ve accomplished quite a lot. I bought a new car, got engaged, had a few vacations – so all in all, I’d say it’s been an eventful and successful year. However, this man has spent the past year gluing together 42,000 matches and lighting them in a glorious ball of fire.
And I’m not even lying when I say he had a much better year…
One day, wallacemk was playing around with matches when an insane idea popped into his mind. Now, most people would have just left it there and let it remain as idle chat, but not this hero among men.
Nearly a year after conjuring up the idea, Wallace’s idea had taken the internet by storm. It’s the perfect combination of being SO nerdy, and mind-blowingly awesome (kinda like an Avengers movie). Wallace’s project involved gluing 42,000 matches together to create a giant sphere, and then setting it on fire.
And it is beautiful.
Speaking to Bored Panda, this is Wallace’s remarkable story…
“It took about ten months and I think the cost was around $500.
“I was playing around with matches one day and thought about how the heads of matches are slightly larger than the bodies. It got me wondering what would happen if I started gluing them together and never stopped. I imagined a sphere would form so I set out to find out.”
“As I started the project I was very interested in trying to figure out approximately how many matches I would need. I was buying them in boxes of 300 from my grocery store (I am sure they thought I was crazy) and needed to know if I was about to break the bank. I started playing around in the modeling software Rhino to get a sense of what this match sphere would ultimately become.”
And here’s the boring part…
“I used that 0.82 degree angle to help me find the circle that the matches would create based on their shape. According to the program, if all matches are created equally (which they are not) then I would get a circle comprised of 439 matches that is 17.643″ in diameter. The surface area of a sphere can be found with the equation 4πr2 and since r=8.8215″ we get 977.405 square inches. Our matches each take up approximately 0.0156 square inches of that surface so 977.405 square inches / 0.0156 square inches = 62,654 matches in a perfect world.”
“I modeled the damn thing but my computer couldn’t render it. I had to keep cutting away parts until I stopped running out of memory. For your pleasure, here is a quarter of the sphere rendered in virtual reality.”
“Then the gluing began! I think the best way to describe this process is to articulate my mental and emotional state while gluing matches together for hours upon hours.”
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