On The Sheer Enormity Of A Trillion Dollars (Bryson)

[L]et’s just try to grasp the concept of $1 trillion. Imagine that you were in a vault filled with dollar bills and that you were told you could keep each one you initialed. Say, too, for the sake of argument that could initial one dollar bill per second and that you worked straight through without ever stopping. How long do you think it would take to count a trillion dollars? Go on, humor me and take a guess. Twelve weeks? Two years? Five?

If you initialed one dollar every second, you would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days—something over three years—to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and after almost a thousand years you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates. But not until 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar.

Bill Bryson
I’m A Stranger Here Myself: Notes On Returning To American After Twenty Years Away (1999, p.52)

Posted by Joshua Hynes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 8:37pm. It has been filed under Media, Books, Quotes, Writers, Joshua.

Comments

Okay. So only one person has cared enough to leave their two cents. How depressing! Especially considering all the trouble I went through posting this in the first place. Well you can leave a comment if you want. It might cheer me up.

thanks

Andy wrote on Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 3:03am.