I am a failure.

No, not at life in general or as a father or at any of the stuff that really matters. Not even as a result of my own mother stating, "I like to read Lindsay's blog, yours is boring". Rather, because my attempts this evening to make a Tesla Turbine out of an old box of diapers were a complete flop.

Over the last several days, I have been surfing various sites including: Hack-A-Day, Popular Science How 2.0 and Make Magazine. A common theme has been the recreation of various items designed and built by Nikola Tesla. This man was a genius - I think one of the smartest men of all time (though towards the end of his life he went a little nutty...). He invented things like Wireless Communications, A/C Power Transmission, Fluorescent Lights and most notably for this evening the Tesla Turbine.

This turbine operates without blades of any kind and will work with any fluid, including plain air. It's design is so very simple that a child could build a rudimentary version of one (not a grown man and father of almost three though...). It is essentially a series of platters fixed together with holes in their centers. The fluid enters the top and exits in the middle, transferring most of it's kinetic energy in the process (using the Boundary Layer Effect).

I found a version of this made completely out of cardboard on a "Turbine Builder's Club" that the author claims rotates at around 3000 rpm using nothing but his own breath pumped through a straw (see picture). I thought to myself, "I can do that" (and I knew it was me because I recognized the inner voice).

Thus, after dinner this evening, I whipped out some scissors and began chopping away at a box of pampers. I also had a package for an Ethernet patch cable that was (and still is) a perfect shape for this project. It has a circular central area with a tube attached on a tangent.

So, after much hacking and slashing I had created five perfect platters out of corrugated cardboard (don't use this stuff, it doesn't work...) and was attaching them to the pencil crayon axle. My final platter ripped - so my awesome turbine of goodness had four platters that were very thick with large gaps between them (this is not good design).

I recognized that my results would not be stellar, but I pressed on. I'm tenacious!

With the final assembled product in hand I began to exhale like a beached whale through it's blow hole (It's a good image, eh?). I have fairly powerful lungs and I can circular breath from my years of playing bagpipes. This part of the experiment I felt was in the bag - even if the system did not operate as a true turbine I could fake it through the Herculean power of my super human lungs.

So, I forced enough air through this thing to fill a hot air balloon and yes it did spin (at a relative velocity of about half as fast as my head was spinning from lack of oxygen - or about twice per second).

But the punch line in this story is not me passing out from a lack of air, oh no, it was my supportive wife reaching out and grabbing the (slowly) rotating axle and giving me her heartfelt encouragement:

"Oh boy, Ben. That thing has torque..."

As I said. I'm a failure.

Here are a couple of photos of this evening's efforts.