SortStack #2734 — 2033-12-03
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- A Venus flytrap snapping shut on a fly 102 ms
The plant can count: it only snaps after two trigger-hair touches within about 20 seconds, which keeps it from wasting energy on raindrops.
- One swing of a grandfather clock's pendulum 1 sec
A pendulum about one metre long swings in almost exactly one second — a coincidence so neat it was once proposed as the definition of the metre.
- The Wright brothers' first powered flight 12 sec
The 1903 flight covered just 36.5 metres — shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. Within 66 years, humans were on the Moon.
- A proper hand wash, by WHO guidelines 19.8 sec
The recommended scrub lasts about as long as singing 'Happy Birthday' twice — most people manage barely a third of it.
- The Titanic's sinking, from iceberg to going under 2.7 h
The ship's band famously kept playing on deck for most of it — and the iceberg itself had likely calved from a Greenland glacier years earlier.
- The construction of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona (so far) 143.9 years
Begun in 1882 and still unfinished, it only received an official building permit in 2019 — Gaudí said 'my client is not in a hurry'.