In this episode of Science Shack, Adam asks if there’s a limit to how tall you can make a building. The tallest building in the world when the programme was filmed was the Petronus Towers in Kuala Lumpur, which rise up over a quarter of mile. It is engineering and design skills which allow us to build so high, but the physical properties of the materials are also critical.

Bricks, which have been around for thousands of years, are incredibly strong. A single brick can take a pressure of about 10 tons, which is strong enough to support a five-mile tall tower made out of bricks. Unfortunately walls of single bricks have little sideways stability, this can only be achieved by building walls thicker at the bottom and adding buttresses. So, bricks have a practical design limit of about 15 storeys - any taller than this and your whole ground floor would be solid brick!

Steel can be 25 times stronger than brick, and has the advantage that it can be bolted together, and overlapped at joints, so that it can have sideways as well as vertical strength.

To demonstrate the importance of design, the Science Shack team chose to make a tall tower out of paper, in itself a very weak material. However, when paper is rolled into thick tubes, which are fitted together in a framework that can withstand both compressional and tensional stresses, it becomes very strong. Strong enough that the team were able to build a 7m tall tower that supported a lift, a lift platform and Adam!

As you’ll have seen in this episode of Science Shack, constructing a tall building requires engineering and design skills. You can demonstrate yours using just spaghetti and jelly babies. Follow the rules below to see if you can outdo the volunteers featured on our programme – or why not compete against friends in your own tall building competition!

Stuff you need

• Spaghetti
• Jelly babies
• Tape measure
• An egg

    next > Page 1 of 2