Question

§A favorite circus act is the “human cannonball,” in
which a person is shot from a long barrel.

§Before the Italian Zacchini brothers invented the compressed air powered cannon to shoot human cannonballs in the 1920s, the Englishman George Farini used a spring-loaded cannon to do the same since the 1870s.

§Suppose we want to recreate the spring-loaded human cannonball act with a spring inside of a barrel.

§Suppose the barrel is 4.00 m long, and you have room to compress the spring by 3.30 m.

§Further, let’s point the barrel vertically toward the ceiling of our auditorium, where at a height of 7.50 m above the head is a bar that our human cannonball of height 1.75 m and mass 68.4 kg is supposed to grab on to at the top.

§What is the value of the spring constant needed to accomplish this stunt?

Answer 1