How many pillows would you need to survive a fall from a church tower?
The praised Dutch book "Koning van Katoren" features an 18 year old who wants to become king of his country of Katoren, which had been under the regency of half a dozen evil ministers for his whole life. The ministers gave him a series of impossible tasks, like curing a plague and cutting down a dangerous pomegranate tree which drops actual grenades. He miraculously succeeded in every task, and the exhausted ministers eventually ordered him to just jump down a church tower.
But by this time he has become so popular with the people of his kingdom, that thousands of them travel to the church in question, all carrying their bed pillows. They pile them up high before the tower, and when the boy finally makes the jump, his fall is literally cushioned and he survives without any injury.
The tower's height is never stated in the story, but the tallest and most famous church tower in the Netherlands is the Domtoren at 112 meters tall. Because he did not jump from the actual roof, but rather from the highest balcony, let's say he fell 100 meters.
How many pillows are needed to cushion his fall and leave him unscathed? A rough order-of-magnitude estimation is fine: I am curious if it would have been closer to a thousand people that showed up, or more like a hundred thousand.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/165010. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Without having the information to crunch numbers on this... I'm going to call it plausible, but only if the commoners have enough knowledge of physics.
What you really need is to absorb energy slowly. For this to happen, your pillows will have to be able to "give" a lot, and quickly. Now, the good news is we are presumably talking about down pillows, as opposed to modern stuff, which does have quite a bit of "give", especially if someone knows enough physics to tell the peasants to take out some of the stuffing first.
That said, your best bet would be if you can somehow construct the sort of air bag that professional stunt performers use. Failing that, your hero is probably better off jumping into a series of awnings that will rip as he hits them. It's not inconceivable that a bunch of peasants could arrange to erect such structures, though it starts to stretch belief that the evil ministers will just look the other way. Another option (that could be used in addition to all of the above) would be for the hero to hold one or more pillow cases over his head to use as a makeshift parachute. This almost surely wouldn't be enough on its own, but might slow his fall enough in combination with other methods.
See also https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/8wqy7o.
That said, the one thing that will really help is if the pile of pillows is built against the side of the church to form a slope. This way the pillows are absorbing some of the hero's energy, but they are also working to redirect his downward momentum into sideways momentum. If you can do that over a sufficient distance, you can survive a fall onto concrete (how to avoid friction-related issues is left as an exercise for the reader).
If the pile of pillows forms a relatively steep slope against the side of the church, and the hero hits it right, and his clothes don't shred from the friction, I would say it's plausible that, between the friction of sliding down the slope-of-pillows and the cushioning effect of the same, he could survive.
On the other hand, since the height of the tower isn't known... it might be as little as, say, five stories, if this is a smaller, local church.
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