Walter Krug has been an instrument designer for 33 years for the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He had a tough time narrowing his list to just one object. “A few items have wowed me in my lifetime,” he says. “As a farm boy growing up in Pennsylvania I was subjected to many different machines. One of these machines was a corn sheller. It was very simple in construction and yet it would remove the kernels from the cob no matter the size or shape of the corn. The second device was a thing called a knotter, on a hay baler. I have studied it many, many times,” Krug says, “and can’t figure out how it works. But it does and quite well.”

In the end, the machinist’s top prize goes to his fishing reel. “Maybe the greatest engineered device I own is a fishing reel. In particular a spinning reel. If I consider all the things it must do—from being able to use it whether you’re right-handed or left, setting variable drag, casting and retrieving the line without it getting tangled, being submerged under water without damage, and being manufactured at a reasonable price— someone did a great job on this.”

M. Gordon “Reds” Wolman ’49 says his walking stick gets the honor of best-engineered object. “I use this walking stick from REI as a cane,” explains the B. Howell Griswold Jr. Professor of Geography and International Affairs in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. “It is lightweight, it has a comfortable handle, it’s very strong, and it’s retractable. It telescopes into a very short length, which fits into a suitcase. It also has the ability to become either a point or rubber at the base. The rubber at the end of the cane has a hole in it so you can rotate a spring coil from one position to another, rotating an inner cylinder that allows the point to come through the rubber. You lock it into that position or rotate it out of that position so that the point retracts again.”