February 11, 2004
Tornado in a Can
The Washington Post discovered it first, then the New York Times. Now, the promoters of the Windhexe, otherwise known as ‘Tornado in a Can,’ have their own Web site.
As its nickname implies, the Windhexe works by literally creating a tornado inside itself, reducing pretty much anything inside to inert dust, at a much smaller volume than it started out having. At right: a beet before and after its encounter with the device.
The promoters' original field was chicken processing; the chicken industry has a deep interest in anything that can help it deal with problematical mountains of guck.
It's also caught the eye of an Australian mining company which wants to dry out large quantities of coal, and a pharmaceutical company which wants an economical way to separate egg shells from membranes. There are people who could explain how artifical tornadoes can separate egg shells from their membranes; I am not one of them. There has been very little discussion of using it on a large scale to deal with municipal garbage, which is what first came to my mind.
To date nobody, including the inventor, actually understands why the contraption works. I find this very pleasing, for some reason.
(A Google search turns up an unlikely number of sermons.)