$1.5 million is not a lot of money – it can fit in a briefcase

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

26 March 2006

The Armenian Brothers have claimed that they gave one and a half million dollars to Raila Odinga in a hotel room. The politician says that this is not true. After all, 1.5 million dollars “is not the kind that you would carry around, it wouldn’t fit in a briefcase.” But is that counter-claim true? Can one carry this amount of cash around in a briefcase?

All American currency notes are the same size. They are exactly 6.125 inches wide by 2.625 inches tall. But before going very far, let us digress a little. Why did they pick on such seemingly awkward values…6.125 and 2.625, why not simply 6.1 and 2.6?

Well, Americans still use the old imperial system of measurements – inches, feet, miles etc. these units are cumbersome when converting from one to the next, for example, 12 inches make a foot, 3 feet are a yard, 1,760 yards make a mile and so on. However, the inch is divided into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths etc. Mathematically, this quite elegant – it is a geometric sequence.

Every fraction is a constant multiple of the one preceding it. A half of a half is a quarter; a half of a quarter is an eighth; a half of an eighth is a sixteenth and so on. Beautiful, isn’t it? Well, yes, until you convert those numbers into decimal fractions – then you get 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, and 0.625 for a half, a quarter, an eighth and a sixteenth respectively. Thus the American currency note is six and an eighth inches wide by two and a sixteenth inches tall.

Now let’s go back to our main concern - can one and a half million dollars fit in a briefcase? If it is in one-dollar notes, the answer is no. The notes would be too many and too heavy. The American currency note weighs about one gram, thus 1.5 million of them would weigh about 1.5 million grams, which is 1,500kg (remember, a kilogram is 1,000 grams), or 1.5 metric tonnes. That is you would need a Pick-Up truck to carry the cash. Interestingly, one million dollars would weigh one tonne, giving a new meaning to the phrase “a tonne of money”!

If, on the other hand, the money is in 100-dollar notes, then we divide the numbers by 100. This brings it down to 15,000 notes weighing only 15kg. This would be easy to carry around, but can it fit in a briefcase? Well, I have a smallish looking case that measures 50cm by 35cm by 10cm. Let’s see if it can carry the cash.

If the money was arranged in bundles of 100 notes, each bunch would be about one centimetre high. The 15,000 notes would make 150 bundles. The dimensions of each note are 6.125 by 2.625 inches. This converts to about 15.6 centimetres by 6.7cm.

Therefore, three bundles would fit along the length of the briefcase (15.6cm times three equals 46.8cm) and five along the width (6.7cm times 5 equals 33.5cm). That makes a total of 15 bundles in one layer.

Now, each bundle is one centimetre high, therefore my briefcase can take ten layers of the notes. This comes to a total of 150 bundles (15 times 10) – the exact number that makes 1.5 million dollars. And there will be some little space left on the sides!

So the answer is: 1.5 million dollars is not a lot of money. It can fit in a briefcase and it is light enough to carry around.