Originally published at: Reporter travels to Ghana to verify height of extremely tall man | Boing Boing
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That poor guy (marfan syndrome is not something I’d wish on anyone) has an outlook on life that I can only aspire to.
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There’s a lot of WTF in this write up.
Claimed to be 9’6". Oops, turns out he’s 7’4".
The local hospital didn’t have “proper measuring equipment”? Only able to be fixed when a reporter traveled from another country with a…tape measure?
He continues to grow “every three to four months”? Is he molting?
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I have a friend who is a fencer and groundworker. One of his friends, for xmas a few years back, gifted him a posh tape-measure ( one of those ones that comes in a circular leather case with a winding handle on the side). After measuring up a job for 30-odd yards of fence, then fitting it, and finding himself at least a panel short, discovered that the tape measure started at five-foot-six.
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It’s fine, we just get old Barney to lie down for the first bit. You don’t mind at all do ya Barney?
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There are reports of people ordering cheap Chinese tape measures that turn out to use Chinese inches.
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Wait - Chinese Inches are thing??
I have a cheap fabric cheap tractable tape measure - i should double check it!
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Just saying… Chinese centimetres are the same length as all other centimetres…
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Not only is he nowhere near the tallest man alive, he’s nowhere near the tallest person who ever lived. Robert Wadlow reached a height of 8 feet 11.1 inches—nearly 9 whole feet.
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You know who IS nine-foot six? Hint:
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Yes, in theory, though their representations on IRL measuring tools aren’t always the same, especially with cloth tapes. In Jorpho’s video, even when the vlogger lined up the two tapes according to the centimeters (3:46 in the video), you can see that the tapes don’t match each other. The tape on the top (the one that the vlogger said was Chinese) has slightly longer units than the tape on the bottom.
As a retired seamstress/patternmaker, I’ve had real-life experience with cloth tapes not being the same, throwing off a project. Cotton or plastic tapes can stretch or shrink. Best bet is to buy fiberglass tapes, but still not guaranteed. Check new tapes against a trusted source, and always use the same tape throughout a project!
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The headline is slightly misleading, the reporter works for the BBC (BBC News Pidgin) in Ghana, he didn’t have to travel that far.
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Thankfully, NIST’s “Tape Tunnel” has us covered:
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How many hospitals (anywhere in the world) have height measuring equipment for over 9 feet?
He was too tall for their scale, the hospital improvised, clearly they made a mistake when calculating their added pole as a extension.
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