We have all had random thoughts and ideas that seem ingenious at the time but become more convoluted and ridiculous the longer we think about them. reddit user wallacemk had such an idea, but he, unlike many, was determined to turn his absurd idea into reality. After spending 10 months and $500, wallacemk had a sphere constructed entirely of matches and glue. But what do you do with such a precise yet impractical item? You set it on fire, of course.
According to wallacemk for Bored Panda: “I was playing around with matches one day and thought about how the heads of matches are slightly larger than the bodies. It got me wondering what would happen if I started gluing them together and never stopped. I imagined a sphere would form so I set out to find out.
I started playing around in the modeling software Rhino to get a sense of what this match sphere would ultimately become. I used that 0.82 degree angle to help me find the circle that the matches would create based on their shape. According to the program, if all matches are created equally (which they are not) then I would get a circle comprised of 439 matches that is 17.643″ in diameter. The surface area of a sphere can be found with the equation 4πr2 and since r=8.8215″ we get 977.405 square inches. Our matches each take up approximately 0.0156 square inches of that surface so 977.405 square inches / 0.0156 square inches = 62,654 matches in a perfect world.”