Steel Wire: The Record Breakers!
Over the past few weeks the BS Stainless blog has been focusing exclusively on steel wire, bringing you a series of articles that are as diverse as the material itself. This edition of the blog will highlight the exceptional diversity of steel and stainless steel wire more than any of the previous articles have done! Let's take a dive headlong into the world record books...
World's Longest Chinese Dancing Dragon
Designed and built collaboratively between representatives of Zhongshan in China and Canada's Cross-Cultural Community Services Association and the City of Markham, the longest Chinese dancing dragon ever created measured an unbelievable 5,568.46 metres in length.
The dragon's head was made using faux fur, foam and papier-mâché; all of these disparate elements were held together on a frame made from stainless steel wire. Stainless steel was also used to create poles which, held by more than 3,000 operators, allowed the dragon to dance for more than 11 minutes.
World's Largest Paperclip
Made by Russia's Evgeny Stepovik from a single length of stainless steel wire, the largest paperclip ever made stands at a towering 9.28 metres in height and weighs in at a whopping 530 kilograms.
World's Largest Dental Caps
This record was set by engineers at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Canada, who together used stainless steel wire to fashion dental caps measuring 50 centimetres in length and 13 centimetres in diameter, each of which weighed 13 kilograms. The finished caps were fitted to the cracked tusks of an Asian elephant named Spike, a resident of Calgary Zoo in Alberta.
World's Largest Flower Structure
Located at Jin Xiu Anren Flower Park in the Sichuan Province of China, the biggest architectural flower structure in the world measures 23.45 metres in height, 26.06 metres in width and 37.66 metres in length. The impressive installation, shaped to look like a castle, utilised more than 120 tons of stainless steel wire in its construction and took over 70 days to complete.
World's Longest Pendulum
In an experiment carried out by Professor Fred McNair and colleagues from the Michigan College of Mines in the USA more than 120 years ago, the world's longest pendula were created from two 1,353-metre lengths of steel piano wire. The pendula were suspended down a deep shaft at Michigan's Tamarack Mines and, contrary to the expectations of the research team, were actually closer together at the top of the mine than at the bottom.
Please browse the BS Stainless website to find out more about the comprehensive collection of stainless steel wire we supply, including access to a library of technical documents.