You can’t triple the size of a human and expect triple the performance—the mechanics don’t work like that. Huge animals tend to have short, squatty legs (rhinos), or extremely long legs relative to their torso (giraffes). Wadlow grew too large given the structure of the human body. There are limits to scaling. Writing before Wadlow’s time, biologist J. B. S. Haldane once showed how many things this scaling issue applies to. A flea can jump two feet in the air, an athletic man about four. But if a flea were as large as a man, it would not be able to jump thousands of feet—it doesn’t scale like
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