World’s Longest Straight Staircase: Get Ready To Be Dizzy!

Some things in life are important to know, even if you don’t know that you don’t know it now, if you know what I mean. For example, it’s important to know how to tell if someone is a vampire, it’s important to know what happens if you crack an egg deep underwater, and it’s important to know the healing power of banana peels. You just never know what situation life might throw you into when you need to recall those valuable facts. In this article, you’ll learn how many steps are on the world’s longest straight staircase.

This staircase has 699 steps, and if you are afraid of heights (or if you are clumsy like me), I wouldn’t recommend climbing it, especially at night since the railing is missing in some places. It was built on the island of St. Helena in 1829. Back then, it was used for transporting goods into the city, and transporting manure out of the city. These days it’s mostly a tourist attraction, although not very many tourists actually climb the stairs.

Let’s do the math. If a typical flight of stairs has 10-30 steps, we’ll use 20 as the average. That means going to the top of this staircase would be equivalent to going up about 35 flights of stairs. You have to go up 1,576 steps to go from the ground level of the Empire State Building to the top, which is a little more than double this. However, since that is not a straight staircase, it doesn’t really count. All I know is I get dizzy from just looking at these pictures!

Via: [Nuclear Toast] [Today I Learned]