America's widest newspaper has an interesting story today about shipcracking in which it casually mentions that the world's steel mills produce 1 billion tons of steel per year. I figure it's probably metric tons. If steel has a mass of 7.86 grams per cubic centimeter (see CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics), a ton of steel is .12722 cubic meters.

I am glad it is so compact, as I want to build the world's largest steel anvil. I would hate to have it take up too much room.

According to my exhaustive research watching various episodes of the documentary program "Animaniacs," a 25-kg anvil is 40 cm long, 11.25 cm wide, and 17 cm tall. (Note this is a nice hard steel anvil, not the more common cast iron anvil or the more Anvilanially musical brass anvil.) Multiply it out and you find that the anvil will 1.37 km long, 384 m wide, and 581 m tall, with enough steel left over to make a hammer so I can use the very large anvil to forge a new bicycle to replace the one stolen from my back yard. Then I just need some steel for the bicycle.