In our high-school physics class (a dozen years ago), our fun year-end project was to construct a container out of toothpicks and Elmer’s glue that could prevent an egg from cracking when dropped from a height of about ten feet. The idea was to build toothpick crumple zones around the egg such that the egg’s deceleration would be slowed enough that it wouldn’t crack.
I took a different approach:
That’s a parachute made entirely out of dried glue. Not only is the parachute made out of glue, the strings connecting it to the egg basket are made out of glue too. I only used twelve toothpicks for the basket, definitely setting the class maximum for glue and minimum for toothpicks.
So how did it perform?
Not well. The parachute didn’t catch the air until about a foot from the ground, and the toothpick basket was so flimsy that the egg didn’t stand a chance. The glue strings held up though, so I think that if I had dropped it from thirty feet, it would have had a pretty good chance of landing safely.
If there needs to be a moral to this story, I guess it would be “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket if the basket is made out of twelve toothpicks and attached to a glue parachute, unless you’re going to drop the basket from a height greater than ten feet, in which case, you might be ok.”
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