Rubber Powered Model Airplanes
by Don Ross

    Flying Models - Rubber, CO2, Electric & Micro Radio Control
by Don Ross

   Indoor Flying Models

by Lew Gitlow

    BASICS OF RUBBER POWER VIDEO

by Harding Aero Productions

The Engines of Our Ingenuity – An Engineer Looks at Technology and Culture
John Lienhard ISBN 0-19-513583-0

The Young Scientists – America’s Future and the Winning of the Westinghouse by Joseph Berger   ISBN 0-201-63255-1

To Engineer is Human - The Role of Failure in Successful Design by
Henry Petroski  ISBN 0-312-80680-9

Every few months, American newspapers publish another dreary indicator of the country’s deepening scientific ignorance. In knowledge of chemistry, a 1988 study showed, American students placed eleventh on a list of thirteen developed countries; in biology, they finished dead last. A 1990 report even found that only 45 percent of Americans are aware that the Earth revolves around the sun once a year.

 These reports not only wound our pride, they show that America is losing its economic and political dominance. Such slippage would begin to eat away at the well-being of every American just as Britain’s decline as an empire sapped some of the sweetness out of the lives of its people.

 “Once upon a time, American science sheltered an Einstein, went to the moon, and gave to the world the laser, electronic computer, nylons, television, the cure for polio,” said Dr. Leon Lederman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist,, in 1990 as he took the helm of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the country’s largest science organization. “Today we are in the process, albeit unwittingly, of abandoning this leadership role”.

 Why should a school in a decaying area of New York – and there are a half dozen other schools in New York with similar programs-continue to take so many Westinghouse awards for exemplary research year after year? The reason is startlingly simple: Bronx Science teaches students how to do research.

 From the freshman year onward, they are taught how to think like scientists; they are not just swamped with facts.  They are encouraged to ask questions about what they observe in the world around them, suggest possible solutions, and construct experiments that test the validity of those proposed answers.

“The Engines of Our Ingenuity provides a humane insight to the history of science and technology, relating the past to the present, capturing the dynamics of how science and technology has shaped the course of human history, and illustrating how societal environment and human needs have conditioned the direction of technological innovation throughout history.  It is a wonderful book for both those not yet initiated in the field of science and technology and those who aspire to make contributions through their scientific discoveries and technological innovations.”  - Nam P. Suh Professor and Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT, and author of The Principles of Design.

The impulse to build and to rearrange inanimate nature is as much a part of us as is our instinct to walk and to dance. But just as we occasionally falter in our step, so sometimes do engineers err in their designs. 

The elevated Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel walkways that collapsed in 1981, the DC-10 jumbo jet that crashed in Chicago in 1979, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that twisted itself apart near Seattle in 1940 are all infamous examples of catastrophic structural failures.  Such accidents shake our confidence and make us ask if engineers really understand their own creations.

With clarity and perception, To Engineer Is Human explains how dramatic engineering failures can occur even in an age of computer-aided design, just as they have occurred throughout the history of man-made structures.  Bridges of daring proportions and other successful feats of engineering have always served as challenges to build longer, higher, lighter, and still more ambitious structures -- until some detail is overlooked or some unrealized limit is exceeded and a tragic failure occurs.  Thus structural disasters, holding important lessons of what not to do, have traditionally been objects of intense study and interest for engineers in determining how to succeed more reliably.   

Dr. Henry Petroski employs not only large engineering structures, but also such familiar objects as table knives, paper clips, and children's toys to explain without jargon the basic ideas underlying structural design and its failures.  Drawing on sources as diverse as Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Joyce, and even nursery rhymes, the author shows that the essential logic behind engineering design, and the failure that sometimes accompanies it, are a part of our inherited culture and our daily lives.

Exploring the numerous experiments that led to Wilbur and Orville Wright's momentous flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, Peter L. Jakab offers a clear, concise statement of precisely what the Wrights accomplished and how they did it. He draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, sketches, photographs, and reconstructions of their aerodynamic experiments to show how the Wright brothers visualized concrete solutions to difficult technical problems that had baffled the best-trained scientists and engineers for over a century.

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