The Complex Engineering of the Simple Hook That Could Make Drone Deliveries Real

André Prager turns away from me for a moment, rummaging through a pile of stuff on the cart he has pulled into the small conference room. There are lots of cut-up pieces of cardboard, with a few bags of colorful plastic odds and ends mixed in. "I think the most valuable things in this building are cardboard and tape," he says. He shows me a rectangle of foam-core with a straw, a broken pen, and a few thumb tacks stuck to it. It looks like junk, but because we're at 100 Mayfield Avenue in Mountain View, California, the headquarters of X, Alphabet's secretive division dedicated to cranking out new Googles, it's actually anything but.