WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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- Big industrial inventions
in the 21st century

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are made by research and development teams
at enormous corporations.

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They don't come out of
somewhere like this,

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a traditional workshop and foundry
that can still be powered by steam

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sitting in a rural town in Australia.

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And yet.

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A screw is a very simple machine,

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it takes rotational motion and
turns it into linear motion

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so you can rotate this screw,

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the stuff down there will get picked up,

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and friction will stop it
falling down again right away.

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That's called a vertical screw conveyor.

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And you'll find something
like this in factories around the world

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for lifting and moving bulk
powder or grain or sand.

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What would happen if instead
of rotating the screw,

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you instead kept it still
and just rotated this cylinder around it?

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My guess when someone showed me this was, well, nothing.

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The cylinder will just rotate in place,

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it's just a cylinder with a
couple of scoops at the bottom.

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If you're confused by that, so was I.

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- The Olds name came from Cornwall.

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My grandfather came out in
1868, at 18 years of age.

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Dad made his first engine,
a steam engine, in 1906 when he was 16.

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And 1925, my older brother was born,
he's still going,

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and [laughs] I came along in 1930.

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We served an apprenticeship
under our father, unofficially,

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from when we were kids.

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We try to keep up with the
times as much as we can,

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but using traditional methods.

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Just before Christmas, I think 2003,
we had this new mixer that we'd bought.

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It was 20-odd thousand dollars

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and we had it set up where
we were going to use it.

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Nothing seemed suitable for
the elevation of the sand

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up to the hopper over the top,
over the machine,

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and I woke one morning,
three o'clock in the morning,

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with this crazy idea
and made a sketch of it

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and went back to bed and went to sleep.

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And the next day I came to work

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and I said, I had a
thought about making this.

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Nah, that won't work, they said
and I said well, we're going to try it.

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It was only a matter of days or a week

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and we had the first
little machine operating.

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We drove it with an
electric drill. We set about

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making a decent machine then
and we put it in the foundry.

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It did the job amazing. People were
coming to have a look at it

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and I realised we should put a
patent application in on it.

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This was so different I thought
it'd be easily protected.

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Because rotating the
casing instead of the screw

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you can see that it's different.

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We spent a lot of money
on patent coverage.

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And the name Olds Elevator
had been applied to it.

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And they're made in America and Holland
and France and Spain.

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[laughs] You name it.

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With this elevator, it's a full flow.

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And there's no movement of air, virtually,

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except what might be between
the particles of sand.

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So there's really no dust
generated by the machine.

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Only where it falls back
through the open air.

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This is also a very important thing

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where you're handling
dusty explosive materials.

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Corn dust is highly explosive.

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Sugar. Big explosion
in the USA a few years back

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and it demolished a refinery.
The clearance between

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the inside of the rotating
tube and the screw

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allows product to go through it
and not be damaged, not crushed.

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It's a very forgiving type of machine

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because it can be in very poor condition
and it'll work.

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It's been found that it's a
more accurate volumetric feeder than

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a lot of the devices that are being used.

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- This took a while to get my head around.

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Visually, rotating the cylinder
instead of the screw, is very different.

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But from a physics
perspective, it's really not.

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If you rotate the screw, it
looks like each level in there

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is moving upwards, but
that's just an illusion.

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It's just rotating horizontally.

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Stuff gets lifted because
as the screw rotates

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the particles at the top of the pile

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are shoved out of the way and they prefer

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to take the easy route
upwards through air,

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instead of pushing the heavy
bulk below out of the way.

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When you rotate the cylinder,

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exactly the same thing is happening.

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The buckets underneath force
the particles to go somewhere.

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And when they're pushed into the screw,

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they take the easy route up through air.

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And the next ones do the same

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and the next one, and the
next one, and the next one,

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and everything keeps going up.

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They're taking the easy path.

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It is counterintuitive.

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And look, I am trying to
not make this be an infomercial.

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I checked, and yeah, this is being used
all over the world now,

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from food handling to solar power towers.

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This is a good new way
of lifting bulk stuff.

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So what
I really don't understand is,

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through the 20th century, a century of
industrialization and automation,

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how did no one spot this earlier?

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- I don't know why somebody
else hasn't thought of it.

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In the USA, they were calling me
Archimedes II. [laughs]

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It's different, it's useful, and
if it helps people, well that's great.

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- Thank you to Peter Olds and all the team

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at Olds Engineering. You
can find out more about them

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and about the Olds Elevator at
the link in the description.

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I am going
to have to give you a hand

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clearing up this bird seed. [laughs]