Sunday, 24 April 2011

Poplar Trees

Since we have been here in Braye I have often wondered how high our poplar trees are? It was suggested that I climb to the top of the tallest tree, jump off and see how long it took me to hit the ground and calculate the height based on that.

Given that we had Elizabeth's son David, a first class mathematician, staying with us we set him to work on the problem. He may have been up to the calculation but it seemed too complicated to me. We decided to use the standard method as described here.

One of our tallest trees

The apparatus set up to give the angle to the tree top
We set up the plasters feather directly aligned to the tree top and measured the distance to the base of the tree. After a search for my protractor we measured the angle of dangle.


This gave us the following dimensions, distance to tree 40.85 metres and the angle of 30 degrees. David quickly calculated the height to be 23.58 metres.

Quite high then !!
Posted by Colin and Elizabeth at 19:23
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1 comment:

norma said...

Love it! We did this once at junior school to work out the height of the bell tower. I'm sure we did not understand the calculations but it was fun.

I do think the 'jumping from the treetop' version would have been vastly more entertaining though - for the audience, if not for Colin ;-)

24 April 2011 at 23:13

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