American Scientist

About two years ago, I published in these pages a nostalgic article on folding and delivering newspapers—at least the way we paperboys did in the New York City borough of Queens in the mid-1950s (see "Engineering," May-June 2002). That article, and my memoir on the same subject, prompted an uncommon amount of mail from readers, many of whom hailed from different geographical locations and different times. Many of them had delivered newspapers in their youth, and most of them had dealt quite differently with the technological design problem of preparing the paper for tossing onto a subscriber's stoop or porch. The correspondence, which was often accompanied by samples of folded newspapers, reminded me of the variety of ways available to address any technological problem. Unlike in science and mathematics, engineering does not necessarily offer universally natural and certainly not unique solutions.