It's one of the most vivid memories of my high school years. I'm dozing on my kitchen floor, surrounded by a debris of screwdrivers, scrap wood, ball bearings, nails, old cardboard boxes, springs, wood glue, wire hangers, and lots of duct tape. My dad nudges me in the side with his slippered foot. "It's three o'clock in the morning," he says. My cheek is squashed against the cool tile floor. I crack an eye open and see my nemesis: the golf ball that, in just a few hours, I'm supposed to somehow raise six feet in the air, in ten steps, for my physics final project. Whom did I have to blame for my predicament? Not my physics teacher exactly, but rather a famous American cartoonist who never forgot the strange contraptions he saw in his engineering classes at UC Berkeley . After graduating in 1904, the engineer soon traded in his slide rule for a cartoonist's pen, but his training inspired his most beloved cartoons and even earned him a spot in the di
brought to you by the American Physical Society