The Dawson news. (Dawson, Ga.) 1889-current, 1917-08-07
SEW EN- BILLION DOLLARS
Figures That Help Realize What
That Amount Means.

The man on the street is talking glibly
of the United States's great war loan of ST.
| 0O,0OO,O00. He speaks of it as "a lotta
money" or ''a tidy sum- and observes that
money fights as we'll as talks" With the
average person the mention of any amount
from $1,000, 900 upward commands respect
and so sum involving ten numerals is a
matter of veneratiOn, says the st. Louis Re-
public.
But how many people realize what the
figures 1000, 100000 signify?
The watch in your pocket ticks four times
a second. If it were always kept wound and
never stopped it would take ffty-fve years
and six months at this rate to tick off T.
OOO,OOO,OOO. No human being could count
it one at time, unless he lived to be the
age of Methuselah.
How much, then, is $1,000, OOO, 900? In
the first place, it is more than the actual
amount of cash in the United States, so it
is chiefly matter of credit. 1t is a sum
of money twenty-three times as great as the
estimated Rockefeller fortune To earn it
man getting So day would have to work
6,353,636 years, including Sundays and hol-
idays. If there were no 'unearned incre-
ment" an income of $1,0O0,00O a year
would take 1000 years to pile up the amount
of the war loan.
A dollar bill is Y inches long If the en-
tire $1,000, 100000 could be changed into
bills of this denomination and joined end to
end they would make a strip of paper lust
about $4,000 miles long, much more than
long enough to form a belt running around
the earth at one end and to and from the
moon at the other 1t would take an aviator
flying continuously at the rate of 100 miles
an hour more than eleven months to travel
from one end of this strip to the other, for
the distance would be three and one-half
times as great as that between the earth and
the ~ Ill
would make a green paper carpet around the
circumference of the globe having a width of
eight feet, in two-doIIar bills it would cover
every square inch of Manhattan Island in
New York city
Several years ago when the Panama canal
was receiving the lions share of newspaper
space one of the amazing items to the con-
templatlve mind was the cost of the gigantic
work. We learned that it amounted to the
total of $375,000,000, a sum beyond the
comprehension of most people What does
1t mean now to say that $1,000, 600, 900 is |
more than enough to pay for eighteen Pana-
ma canals? Dividing two continents is an
inexpensive matter compared to financing a |
war.
Having tried to get a concrete idea of the |
amount IN paper money let us translate ST. /
OO00OO,0 900 into terms of silver dollars. It |
is extremely doubtful if there is such an
supply of silver in the world. but
at any rate just suppose there is.
Change each of these "cartwheeIs" into
an automobile wheel, and there would be 875
times as many as there are on all the cars
That the largest producer ever made The
total amount would buy a runabout for
every fifth person in the United States.
The weight of 100000, 900 silver dollars
would be in the neighborhood of 100000
'ons, or twice as much as that of the worlds
greatest building, the Woolworth Tower. To
carry this mass of silver would require a /
rain of 3,940 freight cars, each having
capacity Of fifty tons Not counting, the nee
essary locomotives to pull it, this train would
De elghfy-four miles long.
To pursue these silver dollar comparisons
lust little further the above mentioned
hoard is enough to build solid column fifty
feet square and 500 feet high, almost the
same size as the Washington Monument. In |
a single stack there would be II 900 miles
If coins.
Enough. Even now you are far from real
zing how much $7,0OO,O0O,OO0 is However
here is but little doubt that all agree that
it surely is ''a lotta money"