A physics project at a Pennsylvania high school teaches students about the concept of freefalling — but it also instills a valuable lesson in how to use the U.S. Mail.
During the past 30 years, teacher Ted Barbour’s egg mail design project has become well-known in Montoursville, a town of 4,700 in the north-central part of the state.
Students, mostly working in pairs, take a raw egg, create a package for it, mail it to the school and then drop the packaged egg 16.5 feet — where it will reach 20 miles per hour before hitting the concrete floor.
Points are awarded for how well the package is designed, how inexpensively it is mailed, and whether the egg survives without damage.
“For many of these kids, this will be their first visit to a Post Office,” said Barbour, a former mechanical engineer. “It can be a daunting experience for them.”
Eggs are mailable but must be carefully packaged to help protect USPS processing machinery.
Publication 52, Hazardous, Restricted and Perishable Mail, has complete information about mailing requirements for eggs. Publication 52 can be found on the Postal Explorer website.
Steve Zondory has seen firsthand the students’ enthusiasm for Barbour’s project in his 27 years as a retail associate at the Montoursville Post Office.
“The students get an education when they come here because they just don’t know how to use the mail system,” Zondory said. “They’ve never placed their return address on a parcel or letter.”
A few years ago, one of the students had to ask his mom for their address, even though he has lived there his whole life, Barbour said.
Meanwhile, a former student recently told Barbour that he went to the Post Office to mail a package, and he confidently knew how to do it.
“It’s one of the lasting and unintended consequences of a worthy physics project,” Barbour said.
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