A bit of editorial time-travel here -- while you read this in May, I have, within the past 24 hours, just returned from National Manufacturing Week in Chicago. It was a fine show, a veritable Disney World of software and hardware that could make even the most jaded engineers want to break and run back to their shops to conjure up reasons to apply what they saw. The best thing in field trips since going to the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry when I was growing up.

Richard Mandel
Senior Editor

And yet, I come away with a gripe. A small one, perhaps, but one blazing with an actinic glare.

I have a friend who lives in the Chicago area, with his wife and two fine sons, ages 11 and 13. Bright boys, as curious about the world around them as coyote pups exploring outside their den. For more than a year they have been into radio-control racing cars and trucks, not spending all of their time vacantly pursuing video games or hanging out with slackers, nor drawn into games more sinister. More recently they've been encouraged to build and service their own vehicles. And they're enjoying it. They're getting hands-on experience in complex technologies -- geartrains, how suspensions function, why one electric motor would be better than another. So, seeing that I had time available on the last day of the show, I invited my friend to bring the boys down and I would walk them through, a tour inside the design engineer's world.

As you are already guessing, my friend arrived with the boys, only to be turned away by the guard staff. Under 18 not permitted, by fiat of the insurance company.

Now, it's true that there were some booths running devices without guards. But must the motivated kids, with parental unit close at hand, be denied access to the hardware and software that shape the world, possibly even their career choice? Shall we close down petting zoos, on the chance the goats might nip? The Internet is not as good as being there, gang -- it is non-tactile and will be for ordinary folk for a while. Next year, I want release forms that will allow future engineers to witness their future.

rmandel@mail.aip.com