Air Head

There was once an employee at the the old barn, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who sometimes couldn't grasp simple ideas. One such concept was the difference between weight and pressure.

We had a lot of trailer mounted welding machines which had pneumatic, that is, air filled, tires. The typical pressure in a properly inflated tire was 32 psi, or 32 pounds of air pressure per square inch. 

One day I had my bicycle at the Shop. The tires were low, so I turned on the air compressor to fill them. "What do they take?" Cloyce asked me.

"50 psi," I answered.

"What?" a stunned Cloyce demanded. "How can those small tires take more air than a welder tire?"

"They don't take more air," I responded. "They have a higher air pressure."

"But we put 32 pounds of air in the welder tires. You just said you put 50 pounds of air in the ones on your bike."

"There's a difference between the volume of the air in something and the pressure the air creates within it, Cloyce."

He pondered that a moment, but it was obvious he didn't get it. Cloyce walked away shaking his head. "How can you put 50 pounds of air in a small tire but only 32 in one a lot bigger?" he was asking himself.

We would talk about it from time to time, and he even asked me Pops to explain it, but Dad couldn't get through to him either. I guess science just wasn't Cloyce's strong suit.