Summary

Some things scale well. Double their size and you get double the output (or more). Other things don’t, and my God is it important to know which is which. Let me tell you about Robert Wadlow. He was enormous, the largest human ever known. A pituitary gland abnormality bombarded Wadlow’s body with growth hormone, leading to staggering size. He was six feet tall at age seven, seven feet tall by age 11, and when he died at age 22 stood an inch shy of nine feet tall, weighed 500 pounds, and wore size 37 shoes. His hand was a foot wide. He was what fictional stories would portray as a superhuman athlete, capable of running faster, jumping higher, lifting more weight and crushing more bad guys than any normal person. Like a real-life Paul Bunyan. But that was not Wadlow’s life at all. He required steel leg braces to stand and a cane to walk. His walk wasn’t much more than a limp, requiring tremendous effort. What few videos of Wadlow exist show a man whose movements are strained and awkward. He was rarely seen standing...