<story><title>How tall can a Lego tower get?</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20578627</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ComputerGuru</author><text>I&apos;m a little confused. That&apos;s the weight that a single Lego brick can withstand, correct? So assuming you made a &quot;tower&quot; that was essentially a vertical line of 2x2 Lego bricks, it&apos;d collapse after 3,591m.&lt;p&gt;But that&apos;s not how we build towers. If you create a proper foundation with Lego bricks and distribute the weight evenly across them, and taper the tower as it goes up, am I wrong in assuming it could go a lot more than that? The entire weight of a structure never rests on a single brick...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>Probably the proper translation out of geek-speak and into reality is that there is almost certainly no real structure that can be made purely out of Lego bricks that will cause the lower level to mechanically fail. (I&apos;m hedging for safety. I really want to say there isn&apos;t one at all, but I&apos;ve learned not to underestimate people&apos;s ingenuity. But let me point out by &quot;real structure&quot; I mean one that can be reasonably built in the real world, not, for example, a structure a mile high with millimeter tolerances made out of mass-manufactured plastic bricks.)&lt;p&gt;For another example, one could try to create an inverted pyramid on one brick to crush it, but it will topple long before it crushes the brick.&lt;p&gt;The structural strength under that circumstance (pure Lego, nothing else) is so enormously high, as determined by this experiment, that there&apos;s no reason to ever worry about this eventuality.</text></comment>
<story><title>How tall can a Lego tower get?</title><url>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20578627</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ComputerGuru</author><text>I&apos;m a little confused. That&apos;s the weight that a single Lego brick can withstand, correct? So assuming you made a &quot;tower&quot; that was essentially a vertical line of 2x2 Lego bricks, it&apos;d collapse after 3,591m.&lt;p&gt;But that&apos;s not how we build towers. If you create a proper foundation with Lego bricks and distribute the weight evenly across them, and taper the tower as it goes up, am I wrong in assuming it could go a lot more than that? The entire weight of a structure never rests on a single brick...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nicholassmith</author><text>Yeah that had me slightly puzzled, you&apos;d never attempt a tower with so few bricks as the stability would see it topple over quite quickly.</text></comment>