You might be able to pull it off on an extremely flat surface, but even an exhale would topple it over. Imagine trying to balance a yard stick on one end. This is a crucial role in very tall buildings. But with a properly engineered foundation, the load of the entire structure passes through the lowest elements and is dispersed into the earth below.įoundations also serve the purpose of physically anchoring the structure to the ground. If the building sits flat on the surface, then the lowest elements in the structure would have to bear the combined load of everything above them. (We talked about loads on the last page.) The taller and heavier a building, the more load is driven downward. Firstly, it transfers the load of the structure into the ground.

Let's start our exploration of the structural engineering of Jenga with a look at loads.Ī foundation serves a couple of key purposes.

An accidental bump of the game table is an excellent scale version of a catastrophic earthquake. Buildings, after all, are vulnerable to the same forces that can topple a Jenga tower - forces like loads, tension, compression, torsion and more. But even this simple game can teach us a lot about the more complex world of structural engineering. Part of Jenga's charm is its simplicity nothing but wooden blocks and gravity. (Jenga means 'build' in Swahili.) Scott played the game with her family in Africa for years she eventually left a job with Intel to launch Jenga at a 1983 toy fair, where it became an instant gaming phenomenon. Jenga was invented by Leslie Scott, a British citizen born and raised in Kenya and Tanzania. If you're the one who finally knocks it over, you lose. Eventually the tower becomes dangerously unstable.

Each player must remove a block from near the bottom of the tower and place it on the top using only one hand at a time. Each level of blocks should be perpendicular to the level below it. The object of the game is simple: You start with a stack of 54 blocks - three blocks across, 18 levels high. Jenga is one of the most popular games in the world, third only to Monopoly and Scrabble in the number of units sold.

Ohoto of tallest jenga tower