all things new
...h clouds after the Red Baron-and one wing unzips! But this is no place for frivolous fantasizing. This is an engineering class. Mailbag closures were another early use for zippers,'' Petroski tells the freshmen. “Also tobacco pouches and World War I money belts.” His students Wear baseball caps. Their T-shirts display messages like Lollapalooza Festival '92.'' And they come to class toting logarithmic calculators and 486SX notebook computers with l20-megabyte hard disks. They are the plugged-in Nintendo generation. But they dutifully jot down notes about . . . the zipper. Last week they heard about paper clips. Coming up: tin cans. This is not what they had in mind when they signed up for civil engineering-something more on the scale of the Golden Gate Bridge or the Grand Coulee Dam. But it happens th...