How long a line can a pencil draw?

Yesterday’s useless trivia question was How far does the average office chair travel in a year? Today’s useless trivia question is “On average, how long a line can be drawn with an average pencil before it runs out of lead/graphite?”

Here is how I tried to answer it.

1. The average pencil is about 10 centimeters long.
2. Each time you draw a line of about 1 centimeter with a pencil you use up about 1 micrometer of the pencil.
3. Therefore when you have used up the pencil you have drawn 1000 * 1 centimeter which is 10 kilometres.

And the actual answer is:

The average pencil contains enough graphite to draw a line that is 35 miles long.

I did better yesterday. But at least I was around the correct order of magnitude. If I had started with a 20 centimeter pencil I would have done better. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

---

Copyright © 2013 kimplicity. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@kimplicity.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Related posts:

1. How far does the average office chair travel in a year?
2. Chinese troops line up against North Korea