Cable-less lift (a tiny nerd out!)

Last week, I was at TU Delft for the inauguration of a friend for their Professorship at the university... it's the sort of thing that I find is pretty cool! They give a short lecture on what they are intending to do and research... and all of that, but that is a story for another post (as a teaser, it is about the THz spectrum!). It does get me pretty homesick though... my father worked at a University and I would go there to his office everyday after school (plus going on to study Physics and Theoretical Physics at university myself...)... and so for me, the idea of "working" was the abstract thought would be a Mathematician's job... sometimes it looked very much like staring a blackboard full of weird equations and falling asleep on the bean-bag... so, imagine my surprise when I found out that wasn't what most people did for "work"!

Anyway, side tracking a little bit here... I was writing about this super cool lift that I saw at the Auditorium in TU Delft! It a sort of weird thing... most people would just use the lift and not really realise that there was anything really cool and interesting about it... but if you are aware and looking, there are always really interesting things lurking around in the background just waiting to be discovered....

So, what is cool about this lift???... Well, the lighting is pretty awesome... although, that by itself wouldn't get a crazy nerd out going... maybe a little, but these days we pimp out our gaming rigs with programmable RGB-lighting... so this by itself isn't going to be enough!

If you take a quick look at the underside of the lift... it runs on a screw like system. There is rotating screw on the bottom that runs along the incrementally higher rotating "rails" to lift and drop the lift compartment! Now, this is something that I've never seen before...so I was really excited to see it and to see how it worked. I've only ever been familiar with the more common cable mechanism for lifts... so this was novel (for me... I'm sure that someone will come along and tell me that it is actually more common than I thought... in that case, LOOK AT THE LIGHTING!).

Here is a picture of the rotating hubs that act as the railing to screw the lift up and down... I really think that they missed an opportunity here though... they could have had electric arcs to just jazz up the entire show!

From above... you see the lack of a cable. I guess that is the main benefit to this design, that it is "safer" as you can't really fall... even if a hob breaks, you wouldn't really drop, as there would be connections to other hobs on the rail. However, that said... it was a touch on the slow side.. and was pretty damn noisy! But the cool factor was definitely there!

Oddly enough, I mentioned this to our friend's babysitter... and the fact that it lacked a cable... and then she wasn't so keen to ride it anymore! Even though I explained that it was safer....

I could see that with so many more moving parts... it might be a bit of a maintenance nightmare... so that combined with the lack of speed makes it perfect for these smaller buildings (only 4 levels...)... but it wouldn't really be a great fit for large buildings where you would take forever to go to the top and bottom...

Anyway..., that was my little interesting discovery last week... more to come in the week about THz and the applications of that neglected part of the electromagnetic spectrum... it's pretty interesting!