"Heavier than a ton of bricks"… but how much does a ton of anything actually weigh? We hear weights all the time — "the truck carried 20 tonnes", "the stranded whale weighed 80,000 kilos", "the satellite weighs half a tonne" — and our brains are bad at picturing them. The tool above draws whatever weight you type using icons: each icon is something you already know (an egg, a person, a cow, a car, an elephant), so the figure becomes something you can count at a glance. Below it, a human equivalence: the combined weight of everyone in a whole city.
The tool picks the right reference for each weight by itself (and you can change it with the "Show" selector). These are the rungs:
| Reference | Kilos |
|---|---|
| 🥚 An egg | 0.06 |
| 🍎 An apple | 0.2 |
| 🧍 An adult person | 75 |
| 🐄 A cow | 700 |
| 🚗 A car | 1,500 |
| 🐘 An African elephant | 6,000 |
| 🚚 A loaded truck (EU legal maximum) | 40,000 |
| 🐋 A blue whale | 150,000 |
| 🗼 The Eiffel Tower | 10,000,000 |
Click any of these figures to see it drawn above:
Want to visualize other magnitudes? Try the Hectareometer, which draws areas on a real map, the distances tool or the liters of water one. You can also check examples like 1000 hectares.