In 2006, a group of 5 Boeing engineers decided to break the distance record for throwing a fruitcake. The attempt would be made at an annual event that’s sort of a cross between a science fair and a food fight: the Great Fruitcake Toss, which is held in Manitou Springs, Colorado USA, on the first Saturday each January.

   The Boeing team constructed a “cake cannon” that sent a .45-kg. fruitcake (1-lb.) hurtling out of the barrel at 322 kph/200 mph. Success! The fruitcake came down 340 m./1,116 ft. later—a new world record.

   One of the engineers was Joe Carberry, who explained to an interviewer how their device worked: “We’ve got a system where we get on this vintage exercise bike, and pedal it using a 1955 compressor pump to pressurize a tank. We pressurize the tank to about 60 pounds per cubic inch, then open her up and let her fly.”

   The interviewer, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, then asked, “So what motivated you guys to build a fruitcake cannon with that kind of firepower to it?”

   Carberry said, “Well, Keith, again, we’re a bunch of Boeing engineers. We’ve been doing this for about five years. A few years ago, we used a slingshot. And that didn’t work too well. Basically, we got beat by a bunch of Girl Scouts.”

   Having won the 2006 competition, what were Joe and his fellow engineers going to do for 2007? “Well, we’re trying to avoid our wives divorcing us or becoming fruitcake widows. So we might just try to work on tweaking this a little bit. The bike sort of sacrificed its life in the pursuit of fruitcake launching this past Saturday. So we’ll probably rebuild the bike and even make a couple more improvements. But we’re pretty happy with our design.”

   Speaking of fruitcake launches and other "fruitcake" (as in crazy) projects . . .

   The Science Club, Chapter 4 (Lee Riley): “Andy Roman joined the exchange of emails. Mike Bennett joined. Kim Pao Yu came in. We each described what we remembered about our attempt to launch our homemade rocket on a beach in Pattaya [Thailand] one Sunday afternoon. Each of us remembered our own part of the same experience, but each memory was different from that of the others. As we exchanged our messages, a story gradually unfolded and emerged to become the complete story of that shared experience. And with the complete story, we re-experienced that moment that had happened more than 40 years before. We succeeded in launching the rocket, with an ant as our test astronaut. I can still see that immobile ant, crinkled up on the sand after the rocket fell to the ground. We thought it was dead.”

   The Science Club, Chapter 7 (Vince Bennett): “Andy, Kim, Lee, Robbie, and my brother Mike, allowed me to be a young scientist. We had some wonderful intellectual discussions and our play involved science. As described at the beginning of this chapter, in 1966 Mike and I built a directional microphone out of aluminum tubes and an old tape player. We were able to tape conversations about the length of a football field away. At least we could do that until we recorded our parents showing guests to the compound gate. We had to dismantle our creation after that incident.”

   The Science Club, Chapter 9 (Mike Bennett): “In one of our early Science experiments in Bangkok, a few friends and I wanted to create a vehicle that would achieve flight through a controlled explosion. So we built a little rocket complete with a space capsule, into which we put two ants to serve as astronauts. Roughly resembling a World War II V2 rocket, our first attempt at powered flight stood on a makeshift launching pad. The experimental engine proved to be more of a controlled burn rather than a controlled explosion. We achieved ignition but fell far short of liftoff. Oops! The two valiant six-legged pilots were rescued but our rocket burned on the pad. Undeterred, we returned with a better engine and made ‘one small step,’ but the ‘giant leap’ proved elusive: this time we achieved liftoff, but—oops again—not aerodynamic control. Our propulsion system performed flawlessly, but we rapidly discovered that aerodynamics was not something one could eyeball and expect success. Three of us were dodging our fiery bullet as it ricocheted all over our launch site, going every way but up. We were spared injury when the solid propellant finally exhausted itself and our silver machine slid to a stop. Unconscious but uninjured, our pair of brave ant-stronauts soon woke up and, fully recovered, walked away, probably to find someone’s picnic to raid.”

   So now we know why my fellow Science Club authors had so much trouble with their launches back in the ‘60s: they were trying to launch six-legged fruitcake thieves instead of actual fruitcakes!