Assist by Archimedes

In New York City's Bronx Zoo, Superintendent Quentin Schubert and Executive Secretary John Tee-Van pondered the problem of how to weigh Pete, a 43-year-old hippopotamus. Scales were obviously out of the question. Suddenly they remembered Archimedes.

His principle*made it all easy. In the hippo's tank they rigged up a contraption consisting of a hollow tube (stuck vertically in the water) enclosing a float attached to a moving arm arranged to swing around a marked scale. (On the basis of Archimedes' principle, the markings had been calibrated to register the weight of the water displaced, easily calculated from water's known weight by volume: 62.4 Ibs. per cu. ft.)

When Pete plunged in, the rising water raised the float, which moved the arm, which pointed on the scale. Pete's weight: 3,800 Ibs.

*While brooding in a public bath over a question posed to him by King Hiero of Syracuse--how to determine whether the King's crown was made of pure gold--Archimedes hit on the answer, jumped up, ran home naked, shouting "Eureka!" (I have found it.) The solution: by weighing the crown under water, Archimedes easily determined how much heavier it was than water, compared the result with the known specific gravity of pure gold. A floating body, he went on to show, displaces its own weight in water.

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