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— Photo by Ron Ginsburg

A modern inventor, Veronika Bychkova, a civil engineering student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, left, talks to Altamont Mayor James Gaughan at the opening of the exhibit “Ingenious Minds: Early Altamont Inventors,” at Village Hall on Sunday. “Her parents drove all the way from Princeton, N.J. to support their daughter’s work in the exhibition,” said Archivist Marijo Dougherty. Bychkova did the computer-aided design and Larry Oligny, an RPI mechanical engineering student, produced a 3-D model of a tie method for letter packaging on a Stratasys UPrint machine in the Manufacturing Innovation Learning Lab at RPI. The RPI students worked from the patent drawings of Altamont’s John Mersellis, who lived from 1836 to1927. “We are very thankful to both students for their work and to Samuel Chiappone the manger/instructor at the Fabrication & Prototyping School of Engineering, who made it all happen,” said Dougherty.