Читать книгу Gadget Nation - FastPencil Premiere - Страница 21

Easy Down, for Those Hard Up

for a Way Out

Did you know that fire departments’ ladders can only go up to six floors—and only from a side street—and only if the fire trucks get there in time?

After the tragedy of 9/11, it’s no surprise that a colleague of Herb Loeffler’s, Ivars Avots, recognized the need for a means of escape from tall buildings if the normal exits, such as stairs and elevators, aren’t available. Looking through newspaper articles about tragedies, however, he discovered that the need for an escape route isn’t a rare occurrence. People get trapped not only in 100-story buildings, but also in eight-story buildings. Ivars had a vague idea for a solution, but didn’t have the technical background to make it work. He needed an engineer’s brain and an inventor’s heart to take this leap with him. He found that in co-worker Herb Loeffler.

Both men worked for a Boston-based industrial research company before the company closed its doors. Herb, an MIT graduate in mechanical engineering who also has a degree in industrial design, now a 71-year-old, semiretired product designer, became the brains of the operation. The project was funded by the idea man and another colleague of the Boston firm.

Concluding that a market exists for an individual “descender” device that required only minimal skill to operate, they worked off a rappelling model that mountain climbers use. But while mountain climbers are trained to manage the speed of descent, the average person isn’t. Another issue: rope is heavy. One thousand feet of rope is strong enough to hold the weight of a single person, but weighs more than a person can lift. A thousand feet of cable has the same strength as 100 feet of rope. So they went with cable.

The next step was deciding what to put the cable on. Mountain climbers throw their ropes over the side of the cliff and use a device to slide down. That’s not practical for this use. Herb explains, “The cable needed to be on a reel with speed control—something that could sense the speed and apply the right amount of friction so the thing couldn’t run away with you. A panicky person with no training should be able to use it safely.”

As a product designer, Herb kept it simple. For the automatic model, he used a centrifugal clutch, as in snow blowers and chainsaws, to provide the speed control necessary. When the user goes faster, the clutch puts on the break harder. For the manual model, Herb added a handbrake for starting and stopping. A knob releases the cable. As you crank in one direction, it lowers you down; if you stop cranking, it stops moving. You aren’t actually cranking your own weight; you’re just releasing a clutch. Because you can crank only so fast, the handbrake provides speed control. The crank also allows you to get used to how the harness feels while dangling out of the window before letting go of the brake. Then you can go down gently. Easy does it. Hence the product name—EasyDown.

Just the thought of having to use a product like this one has me shaking. But I guess if I were trapped, I would learn to love my EasyDown.

The manual model comes in at a third of the cost and half of the weight of Herb’s automatic model. “The manual model is the device of choice from five to ten floors. Any higher and you’d want the automatic model . No one would want to crank that far in an emergency. And with its lower price, the manual model is where the market would go. But our biggest concern is that people don’t want to think about safety.”

It’s a serious concern—after all, we humans don’t like to think about our own deaths, much less prepare for them. But even if individuals don’t want to contemplate mortality, companies do. Herb sees a potential market with companies that sell safety equipment to firefighters or miners, for example.

The team applied for a patent two years ago and have had some action on it. They haven’t gone into production, but a partially completed design proves they can manufacture them at a moderate cost. To make it cost-effective, they envision producing 5,000 units. At 100,000 units, the price would be cut in half.

The fact that we might ever need an escape product can be depressing. But the probability that it might save our life, well, that’s the upside to EasyDown.