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Spin Cycle: Reinventing the Washing Machine |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Smart Design
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Thursday, 23 August 2007 |
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Laundry has forever been an occupational hazard for me. Back when I did contract work for the Hanso Foundation , I used to come home covered in voracious little nanobots that liked to eat the stitching out of my lab coats. They also preferred corduroy, for some reason. I had to design a sub-molecular dry-cleaning machine to eradicate the little idiots. My patent application was denied, however, when the machine somehow caused a temporal rift near Alpha Centauri .
 I'm pleased to report that progress continues unabated in the field of
laundry technology. Check out the Airwash , a waterless and
detergent-less home washing machine. Designed by two students from
Singapore, the Airwash is one of the winners of the recent
lifestyle-meets-technology INDEX Awards.
The Airwash unit certainly does look cool. It uses a combination of
compressed air, suction, deodorants and negative ions to clean clothes.
No water, no nasty chemicals, very energy-efficient, etc. But does it
work? Hard to tell. Details on the specifics are hard to come by, and
the advance materials promise it will be washing machine of choice for
the home of 2020. That's a long ways off. There's also the suspiciously
vague promotional copy: "Its touch-light interface marries function
with emotion, humanizing the often-mechanical experience when handling
household appliances." Marrying function with emotion has long been a
hobby of mine, and this sentence still doesn't make any sense. Still,
you have to admire the initiative. The essential technologies of home
laundry and commercial dry cleaning have remained static for several
decades now.
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