A new couch I need to get through the front door, a suitcase I packed for a weekend getaway
filled with stuff I might need… just in case! This is my idea of the top heaviest
things ever. But it’s a big world out there filled with plenty of record-breaking giants!
24. The heaviest crayon ever made was registered by Guinness World Records in New York in 2017.
It took a whole group of people to create this huge piece of art-making art! Huge as
in, half the length of a telephone pole and as heavy as a cow! (That’s 17 ft long and
1,500 lb!)
23. The heaviest pumpkin ever grown was officially registered by the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth
(yes, there is such a thing) in 2016 in Belgium. The 2,600-lb heavyweight champion of vegetables
weighed over a ton! Wait, or are pumpkins fruits? Weigh in on this down in the comments!
22. Each of its 24 pages is made of stainless steel and weighs about 220 lb! “Buddha and
his Dhamma” in Agra, India is the heaviest book in the world, tipping the scales at 4,400
lb. It must take some serious muscle to turn those pages.
21. The most massive light bulb in the world is about 4 times as heavy as a giraffe. It
was built in Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1938 to honor Thomas Edison and his contribution
to the invention. His historic lab used to be in this neighborhood. The 17,600-lb honorary
bulb stands on top of a 12-story tower. In the evenings, it alone produces enough light
for the whole nearby area.
20. African elephants are the largest land animals now living, and the biggest of them
that was officially recorded came from Angola. It was about as heavy as a cruise ship anchor,
weighing 24,000 lb and standing 13 ft tall.
19. Also weighing in at 24,000 lb is the world’s largest walking robot. It’s a huge fire-breathing
dragon that was designed and built by a German company. The robot has its own Diesel engine
with about 140 horsepower.
18. Midnight Rider is the heaviest limo in the world, weighing over 50,500 lb, as much
as 4 full-grown elephants. It has 3 lounges and can fit 40 passengers and a crew of 4.
Whew, time to party!
17. The heaviest meteorite ever found on Earth was so impressive that it earned itself a
name: Hoba. In 1920, a farmer in Namibia happened to come across the 145,000-lb cosmic guest
while plowing a field. It only took about 80,000 years for someone to notice this massive
chunk of iron as heavy as the Space Shuttle!
16. You'll have to travel to Henan, China to hear the giant Bell of Good Luck ring where
it was cast in December 2000. It weighs 254,000 lb, as much as 18 Tyrannosaurus rexes put
together.
15. The largest creature to have ever lived on our planet is the blue whale. The most
massive of them weighs around 440,000 lb, as much as a single-story house. Its heart
alone weighs as much as a car, and its tongue is as heavy as an elephant! Yep, my tongue
feels like that sometimes…
14. If you think your laptop is too heavy, there was once a computer weighing as much
as 40 elephants. Well, the 550,000-lb SAGE computer was a whole system of connected supercomputers
in more than 20 different locations in the US that was launched in the late ‘50s.
13. Ever seen a museum exhibit that’s as heavy as 3 blue whales? There’s part of
an outdoor installation called Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It’s
officially in the Guinness Book as the largest boulder to have been transported. It took
11 nights and a truck with 176 wheels to carry the precious 680,000-lb cargo!
12. The Antonov An-225 Mriya cargo aircraft is the largest ever built. And for good reason:
it was designed to transport spaceplanes. “Mriya” means dream, and, indeed, other
aircraft can only dream of such a record-breaking takeoff weight, wingspan, and overall mass.
A little over 1 million lb is the equivalent of 8 Space Shuttles.
11. Over 10,000 of the brightest minds built the most significant scientific experiment
ground at CERN in Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider accelerates particles to unbelievable
speeds and lies in an underground tunnel. The machine weighs 4 million lb, which is
as much as…
10. The largest tree in the world, who also goes by General Sherman. The General lives
in the Sequoia National Park in California, which boasts an entire collection of giant
trees. But Sherman’s the biggest of them all if we’re talking volume. It would take
9,500 bathtubs to fill its trunk. And at over 4 million lb, this sequoia is no lightweight!
9. The most powerful rocket ever made successfully launched all the Apollo astronauts into space,
and many of them to the moon itself! Saturn V, which is now enjoying retirement at Kennedy
Space Center in Florida, weighs almost 7 million lb. This giant burnt more fuel per second
than Charles Lindbergh, the first man to cross the Atlantic solo, used during his entire
33-hour trip.
8. The Spring Temple Buddha is the largest statue in the world, weighing more than the
Brooklyn Bridge! The true landmark of Henan Province, China is twice as high as the Statue
of Liberty. The lotus throne it stands on is large enough to fit an entire monastery.
It took 11 years to complete the construction of this colossal 36-million-lb masterpiece.
7. Did you know the original design of the Washington Monument was a rotunda with a Roman-like
George Washington? Perhaps that statue wouldn’t have made it to the list, but an obelisk 3
times as heavy as The Statue of Liberty you can see today is a real record-breaker. It
took 36 years to finish the 160-million-lb construction. When it was finished in 1888,
the 555-ft monument was also the tallest structure in the world.
6. Freight trains loaded with coal and iron ore are the heaviest trains in the world.
The true heavyweight among them was a train with iron ore that was 4.5 miles long and
weighed nearly 200 million lb, or 7 times as much as the Brooklyn Bridge. It made its
journey around western Australia in 2001.
5. The largest and heaviest cruise ship in the world is as massive as 2 blue whales,
or just over half a billion pounds. Symphony of the Seas sails in the Caribbean and has
7 distinct neighborhoods, several pools, a zip line, multi-story waterslides, rock climbing
walls, and, my favorite, all the dining options you could imagine!
4. The Palace of the Parliament in Romania is the heaviest of all buildings on this planet.
At 1.5 billion lb, it’s twice as massive as The Empire State Building. Construction
of the Palace in Bucharest was started in 1984, but it’s still not finished today.
So, it, along with its more than 3,000 rooms, could become even heavier!
3. The greatest of the three Great Pyramids of Giza, at least when it comes to mass, is
the Pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu. It's about 7 times as heavy as The Golden Gate Bridge,
weighing 12 billion lb! And it's made of around 2.3 million stone blocks!
2. Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydropower project in the world, and you can find it
on the Yangtze River in the north of China. It weighs more than 20 billion pounds, or
about 950 Eiffel Towers…
And now for the ultimate heavyweight champ. Drum roll, please!
1. It's as heavy as 9 Great Pyramids of Khufu, 150 Empire State Buildings, and about 2,000
Statues of Liberty. Can you guess what it is? One of the most famous landmarks of the
world – the Great Wall of China stretches for 13,000 miles and weighs over 116 billion
pounds!
BUT! That’s still not nearly as heavy as the combined weight of the entire human population.
Altogether, our happy global family weighs an estimated 632 billion pounds! Ok, fine,
doesn’t count as a “thing” but, hey, still worth mentioning!
Whaddya say – which of these things would you like to see? And if you learned something
new today, then give the video a like and share it with a friend! Here are some other
great videos I know you'll enjoy. Just click to the left or right, and stay on the Bright
Side of life!