by Björn Schöpe
January 12, 2012 – Can you enjoy yourself with 175 euros? Sure. Buy a new smartphone, or a pair of nice shoes. But often the disillusion arouses quickly: The device does not work as desired and the shoes pinch. That can occur rapidly. But you can occupy yourself with that money for around seven hours in a totally different way. For seven hours a 22 year old American kept busy with several thousands of coins worth approximately 175 euros (ca. $235) – without spending them though!
He simply put a dime on the edge of a table. Next, on this coin he placed another one and another one and so on. The construction grew upwards and resembled a swarm of insects, that seems to remain upright in the air as hold by an invisible hand. At the end of the successful fifth try, on top of the small dime 3118 coins were piled! 600 quarters, 501 dimes, 313 nickels, 1699 pennies and 5 coins of foreign currencies (no further details are given) form a conical corpus shaped by several circles of coins as one can see looking from above.
The young man published a 4.5 min video clip of this performance on Youtube causing vivid discussions: Enthusiastic visitors asked him to publish another film explaining how to do this coin stacking. During an earlier try the skilful coin piler had arrived “only” at 1000 coins on top of a dime. In his profile TaiStar42 (that is his user name) indicates as hobby: balance. Indeed, according to the clips in his Youtube channel he seems to dedicate a lot of energy to this topic: Exercises on a slackline (that kind of narrow webbing often tensioned between two trees) or playing guitar doing a headstand while leaning against a wall are only two of many possibilities how to improve one’s sense of balance. You can even pile coins put up horizontally. And do a lot of other things of this kind. Just take a look!
The video clip with 3118 coins you can find here.
More clips featuring TaiStar42 you will find in his Youtube channel.