- Big industrial inventions in the 21st century
are made by research and development teams at enormous corporations.
They don't come out of somewhere like this,
a traditional workshop and foundry that can still be powered by steam
sitting in a rural town in Australia.
And yet.
A screw is a very simple machine,
it takes rotational motion and turns it into linear motion
so you can rotate this screw,
the stuff down there will get picked up,
and friction will stop it falling down again right away.
That's called a vertical screw conveyor.
And you'll find something like this in factories around the world
for lifting and moving bulk powder or grain or sand.
What would happen if instead of rotating the screw,
you instead kept it still and just rotated this cylinder around it?
My guess when someone showed me this was, well, nothing.
The cylinder will just rotate in place,
it's just a cylinder with a couple of scoops at the bottom.
If you're confused by that, so was I.
- The Olds name came from Cornwall.
My grandfather came out in 1868, at 18 years of age.
Dad made his first engine, a steam engine, in 1906 when he was 16.
And 1925, my older brother was born, he's still going,
and [laughs] I came along in 1930.
We served an apprenticeship under our father, unofficially,
from when we were kids.
We try to keep up with the times as much as we can,
but using traditional methods.
Just before Christmas, I think 2003, we had this new mixer that we'd bought.
It was 20-odd thousand dollars
and we had it set up where we were going to use it.
Nothing seemed suitable for the elevation of the sand
up to the hopper over the top, over the machine,
and I woke one morning, three o'clock in the morning,
with this crazy idea and made a sketch of it
and went back to bed and went to sleep.
And the next day I came to work
and I said, I had a thought about making this.
Nah, that won't work, they said and I said well, we're going to try it.
It was only a matter of days or a week
and we had the first little machine operating.
We drove it with an electric drill. We set about
making a decent machine then and we put it in the foundry.
It did the job amazing. People were coming to have a look at it
and I realised we should put a patent application in on it.
This was so different I thought it'd be easily protected.
Because rotating the casing instead of the screw
you can see that it's different.
We spent a lot of money on patent coverage.
And the name Olds Elevator had been applied to it.
And they're made in America and Holland and France and Spain.
[laughs] You name it.
With this elevator, it's a full flow.
And there's no movement of air, virtually,
except what might be between the particles of sand.
So there's really no dust generated by the machine.
Only where it falls back through the open air.
This is also a very important thing
where you're handling dusty explosive materials.
Corn dust is highly explosive.
Sugar. Big explosion in the USA a few years back
and it demolished a refinery. The clearance between
the inside of the rotating tube and the screw
allows product to go through it and not be damaged, not crushed.
It's a very forgiving type of machine
because it can be in very poor condition and it'll work.
It's been found that it's a more accurate volumetric feeder than
a lot of the devices that are being used.
- This took a while to get my head around.
Visually, rotating the cylinder instead of the screw, is very different.
But from a physics perspective, it's really not.
If you rotate the screw, it looks like each level in there
is moving upwards, but that's just an illusion.
It's just rotating horizontally.
Stuff gets lifted because as the screw rotates
the particles at the top of the pile
are shoved out of the way and they prefer
to take the easy route upwards through air,
instead of pushing the heavy bulk below out of the way.
When you rotate the cylinder,
exactly the same thing is happening.
The buckets underneath force the particles to go somewhere.
And when they're pushed into the screw,
they take the easy route up through air.
And the next ones do the same
and the next one, and the next one, and the next one,
and everything keeps going up.
They're taking the easy path.
It is counterintuitive.
And look, I am trying to not make this be an infomercial.
I checked, and yeah, this is being used all over the world now,
from food handling to solar power towers.
This is a good new way of lifting bulk stuff.
So what I really don't understand is,
through the 20th century, a century of industrialization and automation,
how did no one spot this earlier?
- I don't know why somebody else hasn't thought of it.
In the USA, they were calling me Archimedes II. [laughs]
It's different, it's useful, and if it helps people, well that's great.
- Thank you to Peter Olds and all the team
at Olds Engineering. You can find out more about them
and about the Olds Elevator at the link in the description.
I am going to have to give you a hand
clearing up this bird seed. [laughs]