Tuesday, December 10, 2002

I want one!
The Washington Post amazes with A Mighty Wind Against Waste: 'Tornado in a Can' Puts Hope in the Henhouse:
CLINTON, N.C. -- Inside the corrugated tin shed that serves as the top-secret test site for Vortex Dehydration Technology's strange new invention, Frank Polifka cranks open a valve and unleashes the force of a tornado.

Compressed air rushes into an eight-foot-tall steel cone and whirls counterclockwise at tremendous speeds, producing winds capable of turning rock into dust. It also emits a knee-buckling shriek that prompts Polifka to clap his hands over his ears and sends others staggering away.

There's a parade of visitors coming from all over the country to see this machine, to witness for themselves whether it really does what they've heard it can do. They want to know whether it really offers a new technology for mining precious metals, pulverizing trash, grinding concrete into a powder that can be reconstituted with water.

But the keenest interest so far is from poultry people who are watching closely to see whether it can revolutionize the way billions of pounds of chicken byproducts -- the feet, feathers, heads and entrails that don't end up in the supermarket -- are processed.
...
Some day, this machine could make a fortune for Polifka and his partners. But at the moment, the machine is broken, or at least that's what it sounds like.

Engineers shut it down and quickly huddle, mulling over a complex mathematical solution they think might help them fix the noise.

But Polifka, a stocky man with a snow-white beard and twinkling eyes, just opens the machine, grabs a broom handle and pokes at a flap of metal inside the cone. The adjustment made, he shuts the machine and starts it again. The noise is gone. In its place is the powerful hum of air, contained in the six-foot-diameter funnel Polifka modeled after the tornadoes he watched while growing up.

The tornado in a can is back up and ready for business.
The only problem is that I don't have any chickens.