A handbook of ornament with 300 plates containing about 3,000 illustrations of the elements, and the application of decoration to objects

What have all these expenditures (ours and theirs) bought over the years? The TNT equivalent of all the nuclear weapons in the world amounts to 25,000 megatons, or 50 trillion pounds, or 10,000 pounds for every man, woman, and child on earth. (One pound in a car, incidentally, demolishes the car and kills everyone in it.) The nuclear weapons on board just one of our Trident submarines contain eight times the firepower expended in all of World War II. To cite some happier illustrations for smaller numbers, the standard I use for the lowly thousand is a section of Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia which I know contains 1,008 seats and which is easy to picture. The north wall of a garage near my house contains almost exactly ten thousand narrow bricks. For one hundred thousand, I generally think of the number of words in a good-sized novel. To get a handle on big numbers, it's useful to come up with one or two collections such as the above corresponding to each power of ten, up to maybe 13 or 14. The more personal you can make these collections, the better ...»