Jan. 30: Inventor Nate Ball uses his rope ascender to climb a wall above a pool on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass.
Posted on 02/14/2007 8:27:27 AM PST by rawhide
BOSTON — A 23-year-old inventor has come up with a tool to give mere mortals the powers of a superhero: the ability to zoom up a rope as fast as 10 feet per second and scale the side of a building.
The battery-powered, handheld gadget is envisioned as a tool for firefighters and soldiers, and helped earn Nate Ball of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, to be announced Wednesday.
While he has practical applications in mind, Ball says it isn't a stretch to compare the tool to the gadgets fictional heroes use to quickly climb to dizzying heights.
"It's neat to be able to create a real-life engineering solution that has the actual functionality described in the fantastic situations you see on Batman, and with James Bond," said Ball, an MIT graduate student who spends his spare time rock-climbing and pole-vaulting.
Using high-density, lithium-ion batteries, the device, including its harness, weighs 20 pounds and can propel a person up an anchored rope at 10 feet per second, Ball said. It also can be used to climb down.
The device wraps rope in much the same way that a ship raises or lowers its anchor, using a capstan and tightly wound rope. Specially configured rollers and a spindle continuously pull rope through the device. A tighter grip is produced each time the rope is wrapped around a cylinder and more weight is applied to the line.
"The challenge is making a mechanism that can continuously pull the rope up reliably with an easy way to clip it in, and without having it chew up the rope," said Ball, a mechanical engineering student from Newport, Ore.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Jan. 30: Inventor Nate Ball uses his rope ascender to climb a wall above a pool on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass.
Too cool. Sign me up!
Bruce Wayne invented a lighter weight, faster one in the 60's.
This is not that new a concept...nor is the technology very "revolutionary".
However, credit is due for atleast having made it.
bump for later reading
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