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MECHANICAL ADVANTAGE


Durometer is 10 when the novel opens. On her 11th birthday, she discovers that she’s a member of a clan of time travelers, like her late engineer father, many of whom are also engineers, and some of whom are what you might call “black hat” engineers who would change the past and therefore the present. Another of the author’s passions, fly fishing, plays a role—it’s the means by which Durometer initiates her travel in time. Among other feats, she travels back in time to help the Wright brothers solve an engineering problem that could mean life or death for the pilot—the lift coefficient for the wings of their flying machine.


In this excerpt, which we adapted from the novel for Techni- cally Speaking, Durometer is showing her treehouse to her new friend, Mac.


“Holy smokes, Durometer, you even put in an elevator?” Mac said.


He was looking at the rope that was attached to a tray rest- ing on the ground. Te rope went up and up to above the top of the tree house.


“Don’t be silly,” Durometer said. “Tat’s not an elevator for us. We have to use the rope ladder. Tis is just the way that I get things in and out of the tree house since I don’t want to carry them. Watch this.”


Durometer placed the fishing rod on the tray and grabbed the end of the rope that was nearest to her. She started pull- ing on it, and it was then that Mac noticed that the other end wasn’t looped over a tree branch as he’d guessed, but rather went up and through a pulley.


“Tat is pretty clever,” he said. “Looks like you could carry a lot more weight, too.”


“My dad said that you can use ‘mechanical advantage’ with pulleys,” Durometer said, working the rope up and down to loosen the pulley.


“What did you say?” asked Mac, pushing his disheveled brown hair out of his eyes.


“Mechanical advantage. You’ve heard of that before, haven’t you?” Durometer asked.


“I think so,” he said.


NOT YOUR TYPICAL FORCE MULTIPLIER Durometer, the hero of a book designed to get kids interested in and inspired by engineering, uses a pulley system—a force multiplier—to move items into her tree house. (Image courtesy of the author)


94


Army AL&T Magazine


January-March 2016


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