In sixth grade, I had an interesting science teacher. After our late-year lesson on simple machines - levers, pulleys, screws, etc. - we were offered a challenge: Create a device that used a simple machine in some fashion to launch an egg as far as you possibly can. The boy and girl that flung their eggs the farthest would be treated to a nice dinner out with the teacher.
The game was on! I came up with a few crazy designs on paper, but basically stuck to the same principle - using compressed air. Yeah, ok, not much of a simple machine, but in the end there wasn’t much to the device beyond a simple lever.
My dad got a giant tank of compressed air and attached a valve to it (the lever), and to the valve, we attached a long clear plastic tube. As you might guess, the tube was the diameter of an egg.
I should provide some more background for this egg experiment. The details of the contest were given to us on a sheet of paper that spelled out two specific details. First, the egg launcher must include a simple machine of some kind. Second, the launcher could not be a rocket. Specifically, rockets were precluded.
On the day that the details of the contest were distributed, my good friend Derek was absent. Thinking back on it, I’m not sure why Derek was absent so much in sixth grade. This plays more into the rest of the story.
A couple of weeks of spring went by, and the day to chuck eggs arrived. Sadly, I had a DEEP class on the day that the rest of my classmates chucked their eggs, so I didn’t get to see many of their ingenious contraptions.
It’s worth mentioning that the best girl’s egg chucking device was constructed by Rebbecca Miles, a girl who lived in her grandmother’s house which was fairly close to both me and the school. She was someone I used to play with as a kid. Her device was a giant catapult built of 2×4s and ropes. Very elaborate.
I got to make up my egg launch on the following day. My dad unpacked the air and the tube from the truck and we set it up in the corner of the school field. Without much fanfare, we dropped an egg in the tube and cleanly launched it from the one corner of the field to the other using a short blast of air.
Using a slightly longer blast it went a bit farther. Being that this launch very easily exceeded anything my classmates had done, we didn’t see much reason to continue lobbing eggs beyond the field into Bell Atlantic’s network operations building. My dinner out with my science teacher and Becky was fairly well assured.
But Derek was also absent on the launching day. And when he returned to school a few days later, without the benefit of the restrictions of the contest rules, he brought an egg-launching rocket with him.
Our science teacher, taking temporary leave of his own rules, perhaps due to the admittedly cool idea of igniting the egg into orbit, took Derek’s class out to the same field. They aimed his rocket at a good 45 degree angle (an angle completely warned against by the amateur model rocket association) in the same direction as my plastic tube and pressed the ignition button.
The science class spent the rest of the period looking for Derek’s rocket, which had landed, ironically, in Becky Miles’ grandmother’s large farm-like back yard. Obviously, he got a bit more distance than I did, but with perhaps a tad less rules-following.
There was a bit of dissension within the class. The rules clearly forbade rockets, and yet here we were. So after putting the argument to the class to vote, it was determined that all three of us would be taken out to dinner. Very nice.
It was an odd trip. Our teacher picked us each up in his car, then we returned to his apartment to pick up his girlfriend, and then off to dinner. We ate at the Lion’s Share restaurant in Lionville, which I’m not sure is still in operation, although I pass it quite frequently these days. I had shrimp.
