#HTE

Australians Create a Never-Ending Slip ‘N Slide

It’s a chilly winter up here in the northern hemisphere, but Down Under it’s summer. For their recent Australia Day holiday, a group of Aussies celebrated by creating this motorized, infinite slip-'n-slide:

You’ll notice in a few of the shots that they’re using the contraption to hang-dry their wet clothing off of:

That’s because their creation pays homage to the Hills Hoist, a rotary, height-adjustable clothes-drying rack designed in 1946 by Australian Lance Hill.

The Hills Hoist (the apostrophe “s” is dropped from the brand name) is an intelligent and space-saving design. Consider that the incumbent design was a conventional clothesline, which needed to be slung between two trees or poles, or between the house and a tree or pole. To load and unload it, the user either had to walk beneath the length of rope (if single) or manually advance the line (if looped and suspended between pulleys). Once loaded the line of hanging clothes bisected the lawn, blocking sightlines.

In contrast, with Hill’s design the user stood in one place, rotating the carousel as needed. An easy-to-use rack-and-pinion hoist enabled the horizontal rods to be lowered to user height, then raised to keep hanging pieces off of the ground. The Hills Hoist was a product design hit, and Lance Hill launched a company to mass-manufacture them.

Although it appears Hill designed the object in isolation, he was not the first to think of the idea:

The Hills brand, however, became the best-known. Hills Industries still exists today and still manufactures the hoist (albeit slightly modernized) and a variety of other laundry and lawn products.

http://www.core77.com/posts/60776/Australians-Create-a-Never-Ending-Slip-N-Slide