Description of a Nanometer

Think of a single human hair. How do you measure the length of a hair? Probably with a common ruler. How would yo measure the width of a human hair? You can use a ruler, hair is to thin. Using any of the measurements you learned in grade school, it seems impossible. Nanometers are used to measure objects the size of atoms but the size of an atom is not something we are all familiar with. Therefore, we will use a human hair as an example and put it to a scale that makes more sense.

Depending on the thickness of a persons hair, it can range from 50-100 thousand nm in width. But what does that look like? Take an air-soft pellet. Each is about .5 cm wide. If you were to place 10 next to each other, you would have 5cm which, according to our scale, represents 10 nm. If you were to place 50,000 of them next to each other  you would have a to-scale model of the width of a human hair. This would measure 25 meters in width. This model is 5,000,000 times the size of an actual human hair!