There is a considerable amount of educational literature devoted to understanding large numbers. There are books designed to aid a child in learning what a million looks like in terms of individual items, like the third-grade teacher who developed a project focused on accumulating one-million teabag tabs. The internet is rife with stories about similar schemes.

In educational communities the theory of grand numbers seems to stop at one million. Most of us know what the next multiplicative is – it is a billion – one-thousand times one million. Then there are trillions; 1000 x 1,000,000,000. Then comes quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, and more, but even the government hasn’t learned the numbers in the ranges above 1 followed by 12 zeros.

This is getting silly, so let’s get to the point.

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A calculation has been done that suggests at least one hundred twenty million gallons of water flow over Niagara Falls every minute. That is enough to fill 5,750 backyard pools.

Time is also a sometimes-difficult concept. Since 1967 one second in time has been defined as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.”

Now I’m sure there is someone who understands everything you just read, but I am not one of them. Therefore, let’s concentrate on the beauty of a natural wonder and all the postcards we could collect.

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In a recent eBay search for Niagara Falls I found 15,429 cards for sale. The prices ranged from modest, to ridiculous, then went straight to idiotic. The idiocy ended at $1,195. There was no explanation for the high price.   

My collection of Niagara Falls cards is old. It was one of the first topics I collected. My wife and I have visited the falls three times, we had a few good meals in a restaurant (long gone) across the street, I played one of the best 18 holes of golf ever at a nearby course, and witnessed a spectacular light show from our hotel window high on the hill to the west of the falls.

The water that flows over the Horseshoe Falls part of Niagara is the Niagara River that forms on the east bank of the Great Lake Erie. The Horseshoe is just a few feet short of a half-mile wide. The water falls 165 feet into a part of the Niagara River called the Whirlpool and from here continues northeast for approximately twelve miles and empties into the Great Lake Ontario.

Here are some of my favorites:

These printed real photo cards were manufactured by the King Card Company of Toronto.