Stacking Boxes - Center of Mass

On Saturday, my parents and I went to help one of my mom's friends set up a bunch of new computers. There were about 16 Dell monitors and CPUs all boxed up. We decided to unpack them all first and stack the boxes on the side. Since we were busy setting up the computers, I guess no one was really keeping track of the boxes. Everyone would just put their box on the pile when we finished unpacking each component.

As a result, the boxes all fell over. The top three or four boxes were not pushed close enough to the wall and, therefore, the stack's center of mass extended past the support area and the tower collapsed.

Thankfully, all the important computer parts had been taken out so the only consequence was that we had to re-stack all the boxes.

Interestingly, we had the exact same problem later in the day when we were transporting a bunch of small boxes in handcarts. Because there was a hole in the back of the handcart, one of the small boxes fell through as we were moving them. As a result, the entire stack collapsed.

The box's center of mass extended past the small support area of the cart, causing it to fall through the gap. Then, because there was one less box supporting all the other boxes, they all fell off the cart.