This Guy Built An Epic Sphere Of 42,000 Matchsticks And Then Set It All On Fire For Us To Enjoy
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Patience is remaining calm while explaining to someone why vaccines don¡¯t cause autism, or why the Earth is round. Patience is trying to get a five-year-old to understand why they can¡¯t have that ice cream before they eat their food.
But for some really batshit insane people, patience is apparently spending months gluing teeny tiny pieces of wood together for absolutely no other reason than ¡°wouldn¡¯t it be cool?¡±
Meet Reddit user Wallacemk, aforementioned dude with 'whytheeffnot' syndrome. His idea of fun is apparently debating whether gluing matches together would make a sphere. So he figured, why not test it to find out?
He started by measuring the average dimensions of a phosphorus match, and modelling his sphere accordingly using software, in preparation for buying the boxes of 300. According to his calculations, he¡¯d need about 62,654 matches he figured. Most people would take a deep breath at this point and move on, but not monsieur Wallace. He went to the store.
Images courtesy: wallacemk/Imgur
At the beginning, things were going great Wallace says in a Reddit post. ¡°I think the best way to describe this process is to articulate my mental and emotional state while gluing matches together for hours upon hours. This photo was taken at a time of excitement and optimism. My theory was working and the curvature of the sphere was beginning to take shape!¡±
Of course, as he progressed, the sheer amount of time and effort it would take him to complete the project began to dawn on him, and he began to dread the stages to come.
That stage came at about the halfway point. Wallace had already set up a system, aligning and arranging matches in batches of seven to make gluing them to the shape easier. Yet, progress seemed agonisingly slow. ¡°The joy of nearing the halfway point here was doused by the fact that I was using boxes of 300 matches and a single box wouldn't even get me a single layer of growth,¡± he says. ¡°The middle was a depressing time.¡±
As the project progressed, and the sphere began to form, Wallace was dismayed to realise that, of course, all the match heads weren¡¯t exactly the same size, so his sphere was misshapen. ¡°I had to let go of the idea of perfection when I saw that I hadn't been able to maintain a perfect growth just by eyeballing the placing of the matches,¡± he bemoans. ¡°I guess I could have templated the curvature and really tried to nail it but I was so far past the point of caring that I just wanted to get it done.¡±
Towards the end, you see Wallace¡¯s labour of love looking like a hollowed out jackfruit, with him having to reach in and glue the matches on, making it slow going. By this point, he was likely spurred on by the much-delayed payoff to his self-inflicted penance.
And finally, Wallace was done. After about 10 months of work (work that he carried out in a metal shop as he tried to keep the match ball away from sparks), he ended up using exactly 140 boxes of matches. Assuming they each had exactly 300 matches in them, that¡¯s a total of 42,000 matches painstakingly laid by hand.
You can attribute the discrepancy between his expectation of match usage and the reality to the varying width of match heads, the unlikeliness each box had exactly 300 of them, and probably him not having robotic perfection in laying the matches himself. Still, it¡¯s a pretty sweet toy to end up with after all that hard work
Of course, then he just had to set it all on fire.
¡°And here is our final result. Green has turned to black, potential has turned to spent, and I am never doing this again.¡±
We hear you Wallace. Honestly, you¡¯re a saint for even doing this the first time, just so the Internet could enjoy it.