Egg Drop Failure
Egg Drop Failure
[Boy tosses contraption off of building with egg in it.] [Egg cracks and little chick flies out while people look quizzically at the hatched egg.] Egg: Crack Chick: Chirp, chirp [Device with cracked egg lands on ground.]

A common competition for school -age children (e.g. in science fairs or summer camps ) is the ' egg drop ': each team is given an unbroken egg (either raw or boiled, and usually of a chicken ), and may be provided with an assortment of materials, e.g. newspaper, popsicle sticks, string, tape, etc. The challenge is to build a contraption that will allow the egg to be dropped from some specified height onto a hard surface without breaking. In some competitions, the rules permit the contraption to be constructed from any available materials; other times, it is limited to only the materials that have been provided. Scoring varies wildly - common elements are speed of assembly, mass of the contraption, creativity of design (as determined by judging or voting), and/or accuracy of landing within a target area - but one near-universal rule is disqualification if the egg's shell is broken.
In the comic, the competitor fails, not because of any flaw in his design, but because the egg hatches unexpectedly during the fall. In reality, the hatching process usually takes many hours [1] [2] — much longer than the few seconds of a typical egg drop; furthermore, the newborn chick cannot fly immediately. However, if it were to magically happen as in the comic, then the competitor would be disqualified because the egg technically broke when the chick hatched from it.
The title text suggests an alternate strategy, one Randall hears was successful in real life: select for your egg one that has not yet been laid. The hen provides both active lift with her wings and significant padding with her body and feathers, thus nearly guaranteeing that the egg will survive the fall. But the chicken may not be permitted in some contests if it is not one of the allowed materials. And even if it were, a chicken might be heavier than the usual contraptions of newspaper and string, [ citation needed ] so it might lose anyway if weight is one of the scoring criteria.
[Boy tosses contraption off of building with egg in it.] [Egg cracks and little chick flies out while people look quizzically at the hatched egg.] Egg: Crack Chick: Chirp, chirp [Device with cracked egg lands on ground.]
