Rolowitz – Rolowitz Engineering

Summary

We have a practical and very widely applicable solution to a problem that has constrained the design of motor driven devices of all kinds until now: a simple, inexpensive, robust, scalable mechanical means of fine speed/torque control. No machine that fully satisfies this description has ever been demonstrated, until now.

We have not discovered a new principle of engineering, we have used already known principles in a novel way. The design makes complete logical and mechanical sense, and is stunningly simple, with a total of ten moving parts. This contrasts with previous attempts to solve the same problem, all of which have been blindingly complex. There are no unusual parts with questionable effects, everything in it behaves exactly as standard mechanical engineering theory would predict.

In electric cars it replaces the Electronic Speed Control (ESC), which, after the batteries, is the largest, most expensive, delicate, inefficient and error prone component, while at the same time providing the benefits of torque multiplication. This would considerably reduce the size of the motor required to deliver any given top speed, range and acceleration.

In gasoline cars it will radically simplify the design of engines, which will only have to operate at two or three set speeds, with the Drive determining the road speed. This will increase gas mileage considerably, and also reduce the cost and complexity of building cars. Given the notorious resistance of the auto industry to novel ideas we do not consider gasoline cars to be a primary target, however.

For unattended situations such as industrial pumps and fans it will again enable a smaller motor to do the same job that a larger one now does, while also vastly improving the effect upon the electrical grid of starting and stopping them and boosting their efficiency.

This is a very brief and incomplete list of possible applications, but it gives some idea of why it would be enthusiastically adopted in today’s energy efficiency conscious world. No doubt it will encounter some resistance as all novel ideas do, but the advantages are too attractive to pass up, and as soon as one domino falls, the rest will be forced to follow or fail.

We built a prototype and it behaved exactly as predicted, and we have video evidence of this. Its shortcomings as a practical device able to do real work were the result of observable and identifiable issues with the implementation, as distinct from the basic concept.

On the upside most of the design work is done, though we will modify the design of some of the parts when we remake them to incorporate planned layout improvements. It took a total of 15 months to reach the point of having a working demonstration, starting completely from scratch. This included learning 3-d printing, buying and rebuilding a 3-d printer, learning how to design 3-d objects, calculating all the sizes of gears needed and how to arrange them, and actually building the device. We are therefore confident that we can build a better version within six months at the very outside, given adequate resources.

What is an infinitely variable transmission?

Most transmissions have a defined number of discrete gears, and must be provided with a means to disengage the transmission from the motor such as a clutch or a torque converter. An infinitely variable transmission is a type of transmission which delivers a stepless ratio range from neutral all the way through to the highest available ratio by moving one single control. It has always been recognized that a practicable infinitely variable transmission represents one of the Holy Grails of engineering. To be practicable an infinitely variable transmission needs to be simple, robust, easy to manufacture, and scalable. Until now no such device has been invented.

A practical infinitely variable transmission is more than just a better transmission, doing the same job better; certainly it can replace the automobile transmission, but this is a tiny portion of its potential. It is a universal mechanical speed and torque controller.

Why is this such a big deal?

It will let all motors of all kinds work more efficiently, and allow a smaller motor to do the work of a bigger one, at little or no added cost.

Our industrial civilization utilizes countless motors to perform an almost infinite variety of jobs. Each one can be viewed as a three-part system comprising a motor, an energy source and the job of work it is doing, which we call the load.

In the case of an electric motor, the energy source would be a battery pack or the electrical grid; for a gasoline motor the fuel in the tank.

The load might be the driving wheels of a car or perhaps a pump or a fan or other type of industrial machinery.

The work being done has two components: the speed of rotation and the torque, or turning power. By means of the torque multiplication capability of mechanical gearing a relatively low power but fast spinning motor can be made to deliver a slow but powerful output. This is the function of a transmission.

Motors are typically internal combustion, (gasoline, diesel engines, turbines), external combustion (steam engines) or electric (AC and DC motors.) Some applications, particularly moving vehicles, require fine control over the speed with which the load is driven, and must be able to vary the power being delivered in response to changing circumstances.

Very few loads are stable and predictable. Even applications such as large industrial fans in HVAC systems, or the pumps that move our sewage do not deal with static loads, but vary widely according to circumstances. For many applications the ability to operate through a wide range of speeds is essential. The problem that has constrained the design of mechanical systems from the beginning is that no practical purely mechanical means of smooth speed control has hitherto been found. Instead we are forced to use inefficient and inelegant methods to achieve this necessary function. The particular workaround varies according to what kind of motor is involved.

Electric motors are either AC or DC; AC motors are locked to the frequency of the power supply, DC motors to the voltage. Varying either the frequency or the voltage of an electrical supply requires a hi-tech electronic device called a motor speed controller (MSC). MSCs are complex, expensive (second only in cost to the battery pack in an electric car) and wasteful. In addition at high power levels they become exponentially larger and more expensive. They are by far the most fault prone component of the motor system, and need advanced industrial capabilities to manufacture. In addition while they can vary the speed of the motor, they cannot vary its torque. The amount of torque delivered by an electric motor driven by an electronic Motor Speed Controller is the same no matter what the speed of the motor. A mechanical gear-based infinitely variable transmission, on the other hand, delivers increased torque at slow speeds, which is highly desirable in motor driven systems.

In the case of internal combustion engines, most of the complexity of a modern car engine is caused by the need to finely vary the speed of the motor gracefully through a huge variety of conditions. If the engine only had to run at one of two or three predefined speeds, it could be made vastly simpler.

Turbine engines, the most efficient of all internal combustion engines, cannot be used at all in most applications because it is not practicable to vary their speeds.

Clearly, then, a robust and inexpensive mechanical means of finely and controllably varying the speed of a motor driven system is of great potential value.

Technical Description

(This part is for engineers and those familiar with the subject, so do not be worry if you do not fully understand it.)

When placed between any motor and its load, the Rolowitz Drive provides mechanical infinitely variable speed/torque control. It can autonomously output any available speed/torque combination (including zero speed) regardless of input speed. It can easily be fitted with a programmable feedback mechanism and be completely self-regulating. It is scalable up or down limited only by practical material and construction considerations.

A Non-technical Explanation

An attempt at a fairly detailed explanation of the whole thing for the regular person with high school science. Any feedback on how to make it clearer would be welcome.

1: Background. What is the problem that our transmission solves?

Newton’s first law of motion is commonly expressed in this form: unless acted upon by an outside force, an object that is at rest will tend to remain at rest, while an object in motion will remain in motion. This is also known as the law of inertia. In order to understand the usefulness of the Rolowitz Drive we need to understand the implications of this law.

Let us take the example of a car on a level road. (We will also consider the complications introduced by the need to go up and down hills, but for now let us keep it simple.) The car is stopped, the gearshift is in neutral, and the brakes are off. No force is acting upon the car, so it remains at rest. Now we wish to move the car. In order to do so we need to apply an outside force. There are two obvious ways to do this: either start the engine and put it in gear, or push the car. So as to best illustrate the process (since most of us have done this at one time or another) we will push the car, and observe what happens. First we discover that it takes a lot of pushing to get the car moving at all. Once it is moving, however, we find that as long as we are content with the speed it is moving, it does not take very much effort to keep it going. In fact if we now wish to stop the car, we have to apply almost as much effort to slowing it down as we did to speed it up. However if we stop pushing it will eventually slow down and stop.

If an object in motion tends to stay in motion, why does it slow down and stop when we stop pushing? The forces acting to slow it down are such things as friction and wind resistance. If we were in a frictionless, airless environment such as interstellar space, our vehicle, once set in motion with a push, would continue to move with no further application of force, more or less forever. If we continued to push it, it would accelerate faster and faster.

So what have we learned by this exercise? We have learned that most of the effort of moving the car is needed to get it moving and to accelerate it up to the desired speed. Once that speed has been reached the only effort required to keep it at that speed is only what is needed to overcome the friction and wind resistance that are trying to slow it down. So it might take the combined effort of three people to get the car moving and up to a certain speed, but once it has reached that speed it might take only one person to keep it going at that speed.

This principle applies to the moving of any load by any form of energy. In every case the amount of energy taken to accelerate the load to the desired speed is much greater than that required to keep it going at that speed. It applies to such things as fans and washing machines, for instance. Say we are wanting to spin-dry a load of wet clothes. What we are doing is accelerating the tub (together with the clothes and the water and also the mechanism of the electric motor itself) from rest to full speed, and then keeping it at that speed. In this case, just as with pushing the car, the amount of energy needed to get it up to speed is much greater than that needed to keep it spinning. So it is with fans, pumps, moving vehicles of all kinds, and hundreds of other uses.

What this means is that when designing a mechanism for a particular purpose, the size and power of the motor is determined by the effort it takes to get the mechanism up to speed. If all we had to do was to keep it at speed, we could get away with a much smaller motor. The irony of this is that most mechanisms spend the majority of their time running at speed, and getting there only accounts for a small amount of running time, yet this is what makes us need the large motor.

So the bottom line is that anything that reduces the amount of effort required to accelerate a load up to speed will both increase the efficiency of the mechanism and enable the use of a smaller motor, both of which are highly desirable.

How does the Rolowitz Drive help? To answer this question we need to delve into one other somewhat technical subject, which what a transmission does and why it is useful.

2. How does adding a transmission solve this problem?

A good example to illustrate the effect of a transmission is the gears on a bicycle. (These are not usually described as transmissions, but they serve the same purpose.)

Most us have ridden bicycles with gears. Imagine first a bicycle without gears. Such a bike has two drawbacks. When starting off an getting up to speed, the rider must exert a great deal of effort, and then when going fast, when little effort is required, he must pedal fast to have any effect. Both of these conditions are helped with gears. When starting off a low gear is used, enabling the rider to use relatively little effort, while requiring him to pedal faster. Once the bike is under way, a succession of higher gears enables him to pedal more slowly while still delivering power to the wheels. At speed, fairly low speed pedaling will maintain the speed because the gearing is high.

Put in more technical terms, a low gear enables a fast input with relatively low torque to move a load that it would otherwise not be able to move. Theoretically if one could achieve a low enough gear, a very small force could move almost any load if applied for long enough. However for practical purposes even though one can make a very low gear indeed by driving a very large cog with a very small one, this would not be useful, since to accelerate a load to full speed would require a series of higher and higher gears, and the resulting transmission would soon be too big and complex to work, and the friction losses in the transmission would overcome any gain.

The Holy Grail of transmissions is an infinitely variable transmission. This means that instead of having discrete gears in the manner of a car or bike, it would deliver a smooth transition all the way from neutral to the highest available gear. Such a transmission would have no need of a clutch or torque converter, a major loss of efficiency in a regular transmission. There is also a class of transmission called a continuously variable transmission, the difference being that although it does deliver smooth stepless ratio change, it must be disengaged when in neutral (when no power is being transferred to the output).

3 Stationary electric motors, an almost unlimited market.

The Rolowitz Drive is a true infinitely variable transmission, in that one end of the range of settings produces a neutral gear without the use of a clutch or torque converter. This is extremely important as clutches and torque converters are not practical for use with applications such as stationary electric motors.

In addition to moving vehicles, electric motors are used to power pumps, fans, HVAC systems, all kinds of industrial processes, washing machines, refrigerators and countless other tasks. These range in size from what you might find in your household fridge to giant pumps used in water and sewage systems. All of them share one constraint. In every case they are coupled directly to the load that they are driving.

This means that we have to use a motor strong enough to move all the way from rest not just the motor itself but the entire load as well. For a motor this is like trying to push a car fully loaded with passengers and luggage, and towing a trailer!

In the case of bicycles and motor vehicles, this problem is helped by having a transmission between the engine and the load. This greatly reduces the effort needed by allowing it to first get itself up to speed, and then feed the power gradually to the wheels, going up in gear as the car travels faster. However this solution is not usable for stationary electric motors because of the complexity and cost of existing transmissions.

The Rolowitz Drive provides a low cost, low tech and small footprint solution to this problem. Now when starting our electric motor we can spin just the motor up to speed, then gradually feed in the load, increasing the gear ratio as we go, just like our bike rider starting in low gear and working his way through the gears. Only in the case of the Rolowitz Drive it is a smooth transition all the way from rest to full power, without “stepped” gears. This way even a heavy load can be driven by a much smaller motor. This applies to all kinds of motors, including modern permanent magnet motors and the like.

Because it enables the use of smaller motors for any given job, and because of its low cost and simplicity, the Rolowitz Drive will result in overall savings in cost and size when added to a system. In most cases he cost saving will more than pay for the transmission.

There are other advantages. The hard startup resulting from not having a transmission is the biggest factor in the longevity of the motor. A motor that is started once and allowed to run indefinitely would last much longer than one being started and stopped frequently. Unfortunately it is a very rare application that makes this possible. Adding the Rolowitz Drive will almost eliminate this wear and tear.

In addition when this technology is adopted on a large scale, it will have a very beneficial effect on the electrical grid. The effect of the hard starting of all of those motors is a very high current draw during startup. You may have noticed that a large air conditioning fan will cause the lights to dim, but only when starting up. At present the grid has to have enough power available to cover any likely demand. If some strange weather condition, for instance, causes a large number of air conditioners to start up at the same time, the grid must be able to handle the extra demand. This means that in practice a great deal more electricity is generated than is actually used, just in case it is needed (which is, ironically, an expensive problem. Once generated, electricity does not just disappear when not needed, it has to be dissipated. It actually costs money not to use it!) This problem would be much ameliorated by widespread use of the Rolowitz Drive.

Control mechanism

This one is also somewhat technical, and will be mainly of interest to engineers.

The Rolowitz Drive has one single component that is the entire ratio selection control mechanism. It is rotated in a single smooth motion that takes the device all the way from neutral to the highest available ratio. This means that it would be simple to fit the control with an electric motor that could be operated wirelessly. There is no need for a physical cable or other connection between the control and the transmission. By providing it with a minimal digital control, all of its functions could be controlled by software. It could be programmed to respond to one device only, or require a password before unlocking the drive, a valuable security feature for bikes, for instance. With robust encryption it could be secure against hacking.

The control mechanism also acts as a valuable feedback device, since the amount of force needed to move the control varies proportionally to the amount of torque being transmitted through the transmission. This means that the Rolowitz Drive can be programmed to maintain either a particular output torque or a particular speed of output rotation by varying the ratio according to changing circumstances. On a bicycle, for instance, one could set the transmission either to maintain a target speed, and require you to work however hard is needed to maintain that speed, or on the other hand to allow you to pedal at a certain level of force and move the bike at whatever speed that amount of work allowed (so you would go slower uphill and faster downhill).

The Rolowitz Drive is automatic, not in the sense that an automatic transmission in a car is automatic, which simply means that it can change gears up or down according to the specific needs of a motorized vehicle. The Rolowitz Drive, on the other hand, is capable of responding to any kind of signal or combination of signals, and in response deliver any gear ratio from zero (no drive at all to the output) to the highest ratio provided by its specific design. It can do this irrespective of what kind of energy source is driving it, or what kind of load it is driving. It can be programmed to do this without any human intervention.

This provides three distinct capabilities. The first is the same capability as an automobile transmission, which is to provide a series of progressively higher ratios for the purpose of providing high low end torque to get the load moving, while also requiring only a relatively low engine speed when cruising. This is the same functionality that a ten speed gear system on a bicycle provides.

The second capability is to be able to take a varying input speed and turn it into a fixed output speed. This is useful, for instance, in harvesting energy from the wind. The greatest drawback of this most abundant energy source is its variability. In order to generate electricity efficiently, it is best to be able to turn the generator at a constant speed. Wind speed, on the other hand, is all over the place. A Rolowitz Drive could be set to deliver that constant speed by constantly changing its ratio according to changes in the input speed.

The third capability is the mirror image of the second. It can take a constant speed input and deliver a variable speed output according the the moment by moment needs of the load being driven. This is an extremely valuable capability, as all motors have a single speed at which they operate most efficiently and also a single speed at which they deliver their maximum power, yet they are required to drive a load that needs to be able to go at different speeds. Because no kind of transmission has been able to deliver this functionality in the past, motors have had to be able to vary their speed. For electric motors this means expensive and high tech electronic controllers. Most of the complexity of internal combustion engines is caused by the need to vary the speed. If both of these kinds of motors could always operate at one or two speeds (the most efficient speed and the highest power delivery speed) and use a device with the capabilities of the Rolowitz Drive to vary the output speed, they could be made vastly simpler and far more efficient.

Scalability

The simplicity of design allows for making very small ones and very large ones.

The low parts count and the simplicity of the mechanism make the Rolowitz Drive highly scalable. There is no mechanical reason that drives could be built to handle the largest possible torque loads for uses such as lock gates. On the small end the limitation would be how small the components could be made. In theory at least there should be no bar to building nano-scale devices.

There is no transmission of any kind today that is practical to use on a device smaller than a lawnmower. This is not because smaller transmissions would not be useful, but because all existing transmissions are far too complex to scale down. The Rolowitz Drive breaks this barrier. Not only can it be built small, it will also, at least down to a certain level, be cheaper to build the smaller it gets. It will be completely practical and economically feasible to build, for instance, electric drills and saws that can never stall or overheat the motor when they encounter difficult to penetrate materials; they would simply gear down to produce more torque, and if the maximum available torque was insufficient to continue the cut, the transmission would shift to neutral, enabling the motor to continue to turn while the blade or bit is stuck, rather than overheating and triggering a thermal cutout.

Competition

We have only been able to find one example of devices that even claim to be an infinitely variable transmissions, the VMT Universal Drive. This drive is based on a completely different theory of operation. Unfortunately the available descriptions of how it works are insufficient to determine adequately the details of operation. However some idea of how it compares to the Rolowitz Drive can be gleaned from comparing pictures of the two devices. The VMT Drive is at the top, under it is a 3 dimensional model of our design.

The two pictures are not shown to scale. The illustration is intended to show the difference in complexity of the two mechanisms. As a direct size comparison, below is our design rendered at approximately the same scale as the VMT Drive pictured.

The advantages of our design can readily be seen.

Use in Electric Cars

Electric cars, unlike gasoline cars, do not need a transmission, but they would greatly benefit from one such as ours.

Speed variation of electric motors is accomplished by varying the frequency of the electrical supply (in the case of an AC motor), or its voltage (in the case of a DC motor). Both cases require a complex and expensive electronic device called an electronic speed controller. These devices become impractically large and inefficient at high power levels.

Such systems have another important disadvantage compared to a mechanical speed control system. Electronic speed controllers vary only the speed of the motor, not its torque. It is often mistakenly thought that this is not an issue in the case of electric motors since, unlike internal combustion engines they are capable of delivering as much torque at low speed as they do at high speeds, and therefore practical electric drives can be designed even without the torque multiplication that results from a mechanical means of speed variation. However this ability comes at a great cost in inefficiency. The high torque needed to accelerate an electric vehicle from rest during the initial period of acceleration imposes a very high current draw upon the batteries, and the size of the motor needed is directly proportional to the amount of initial torque required. Once the vehicle is moving, and as it achieves cruising speed, the reduced demand is such that a much smaller motor could suffice to do the job.

If the initial torque requirement could be met by using gearing to achieve torque multiplication (i.e. a mechanical speed controller such as the Rolowitz Drive), three benefits would be gained: the size of the electric motor and the initial amount of current draw could be drastically reduced; the reduced demand on the batteries will result in increased range; and the expensive. inefficient electronic speed control would not be needed.

Other automotive uses

In addition to replacing the transmission, there are many other uses for our drives in a conventional gas powered automobile.

Automotive applications for the Rolowitz Drive are not by any means confined to the drive train. It may well be difficult and take a long time to persuade auto manufacturers to replace the automatic transmission with the Rolowitz Drive in any significant way. However there are several other applications in automobiles that may be easier to penetrate.

These applications benefit from an important feature of infinitely variable transmissions. We have mostly talked about accelerating loads to speed, and the energy saving benefits under these conditions. Another important ability of infinitely variable transmissions is that they can be used to keep a load rotating at the same speed (or faster) even when the motor driving it slows down.

Several subsystems of automobiles are served by pumps or other devices driven by the engine; these include the alternator, the water pump, the air conditioner, the vacuum system, power steering and power brakes. All of these systems have a common issue. When the engine is rotating faster they are driven faster, and when the engine is idling they are driven slower. This is the exact opposite of what is desirable. You need more power steering help when moving slower and less when moving faster. The cooling system is needed much more when moving in slow traffic, or idling, than when cruising at high speed, but when the engine is running at its slowest the cooling system is also slowed down.

The same applies to all of the system listed above. All of them are most needed when moving slowly, yet that is when they are least able to respond to the challenge. By adding a Rolowitz Drive to each of these systems, their speed could be made independent of that of the engine, which would result in a great improvement in their effectiveness. When scaled for these kinds of uses, the Rolowitz Drive would be extremely compact and inexpensive to build in quantity.

The best part of promoting these kinds of applications is that we would be selling to the makers of the subsystems, rather than the auto makers. The drive would be built into the alternator, and the water pump and so forth. The auto manufacturers would just be buying an improved subsystem, rather than signing on to a new technology. Also we could start out by approaching the aftermarket sellers.

Energy recovery (regenerative braking)

We can provide a much better and more flexible method of providing regenerative braking capability, and not just for cars.

We have mainly been describing ways that the Rolowitz Drive can improve the way motors accelerate loads, but there is another area in which it can be of enormous benefit, which is energy recovery. During acceleration energy is converted into motion; during deceleration that energy is liberated. In a conventional automobile the liberated energy is wasted. It is converted into heat and frictional wear on the brake parts, and in some cases frictional wear on the tires. In electric cars it is feasible to use what is known as regenerative braking, where the motor is used as a generator to put energy back into the batteries. Unfortunately this is a very inefficient process because of the methods being used. Batteries can only be charged at a certain rate, so if more energy is being derived than the battery can store at any given time, the remainder is wasted, again usually in the form of heat, which tends to shorten the life of electrical systems.

By using a pair of Rolowitz Drives arranged such that the output of one drives the input of the second drive whose output drives an energy storage device, either a generator or perhaps a flywheel or spring, a much higher proportion of the energy can be recovered.

This principle is not confined to automobiles. In the case of an automobile lift, almost all the energy required to lift the car can be recovered when the car is lowered, then used to raise the next car, resulting in huge savings of energy. The same applies to fans, pumps, bicycles and almost any other use you can think of.

Social Benefits

This is a technology whose time has come. By getting more work out of existing motors we can significantly reduce the amount of energy we use while still maintaining a high standard of living

Times are changing, and companies are beginning to realize that they cannot continue to pursue short term growth and maximization of profit at the expense of the environment. This issue is no longer on the crazy fringes, but right in the center of political and social attention. Even if they are not convinced about the ethical grounds for saving the environment, they certainly see the political benefit of being seen to do so. What we are offering is considerably increased efficiency at every level: our device is both easier and cheaper to make, and also much more efficient in its use than any rival technology.

Some of the greatest dangers facing the world today are the direct result of our use of energy to do work of various kinds. Obviously we could vastly reduce the impact upon the environment by contenting ourselves with less, and by recognizing the particular forms of energy use that are most destructive and voluntarily foregoing them. This, however, while a very worthwhile goal to aim for, is unlikely to gain much traction in the real world, where the vast majority of the population of the poorer countries have been denied the luxurious lifestyles that they see in the developed countries, and would like to have their turn at the trough.

What we can and should do is to use the energy that we do use in the most efficient manner possible. We need to seek the biggest bang for every energy buck, thus enabling us to still live well on much less energy. This is exactly what the Rolowitz Drive will do. When added to any motor it will make that motor much more efficient, or use much less energy to do its task. It will also vastly improve human powered vehicles such as the rickshaws that are in very common use the third world countries. In this way it can be of direct benefit to vast numbers of people at a tiny cost per unit.

Low technology

New useful technolgies often lock out the Third World, but our drives can be made in any reasonably well equipped machine shop anywhere in the world.

The Rolowitz Drive will be particularly beneficial to the Third World. it is extremely simple and easy to manufacture. It requires no difficult to obtain or expensive materials. They can therefore be locally manufactured.

Once anufactured on a large scale, many uses can be found for them. Third World countries labor is often more readily available than machinery. The Rolowitz Drive provides a method whereby even the largest load can be moved by the application of very little power, the tradeoff being time. In other words a single person could pedal a heavy load up a steep hill; he would, of course, be moving very slowly but he would not have to push hard on the pedals. No presently available technolgy can achieve this.

Furthermore the Rolowitz Drive does not require adopting any new technology to take advantage of it. It will instead make much better use of existing technology. It can easily be retrofitted, for instance, to existing bicycle rickshaws, which are ubiquitous in Third World countries. This would enormously increase the effectiveness and efficiency of a large number of workers at the very bottom of some of the poorest societies in the world, thus raising their earning potential in return for a tiny investment. A Rolowitz Drive designed for such a use could be manufactured in large quantities for less per unit than existing bicycle gear systems.

Funding

A problem we have encountered in trying to bring this invention into the world is that for a number of historical reasons traditional funding sources have become accustomed to a certain set of assumptions which have become so ingrained that they have taken on the appearance of some kind of natural law. In order to explain our approach, which differs significantly from this standard expectation, we must briefly explain why these assumptions have gained their traction, and why this invention should be considered in a different light.

The development of technology has followed the path of continual complexification. The Industrial Revolution was kicked off by the invention of several basic technologies, such as the Bessemer furnace and the internal combustion engine and others, and engineers devised means of using those technologies to do useful things. Over time, flaws and shortcomings were noticed, and a new generation of technology was designed to overcome these. Because as humans we like to follow a well-trodden path rather than forging a new one, and perhaps in the grip of the sunk cost fallacy, we almost always followed the policy of adapting these existing technologies by adding further complexity, rather than investigating whether it might be better to throw everything away and start over. Even when something wholly novel came along, such as the transistor, which did completely replace the vacuum tube, although each transistor was extremely cheap, the technology required to manufacture them was exceedingly expensive. In other cases replacement items required rare or hard to work materials. In every case we have been able to identify, we have never been able to find an essential technology that has been replaced by another that does not have a major drawback, usually higher level (and therefore more expensive) technology. Certainly these drawbacks were not sufficient to prevent adoption of the new technology, but they presented obstacles to adoption when they were first introduce, and thus increased risk for the investor.

Because of the culture of secrecy in our system, it is also quite possible to spend enormous sums developing some new improvement, only to be sidelined by some superior version you did not know about. In other words even the most promising ventures are highly speculative.

The result of all of this is that all new opportunities for investment in future development require the assembly of large amounts of capital, and that capital must assume a high degree of risk. At the same time the large numbers of aspirants to the ranks of the “next big thing” make this very much a buyer’s market. The capital interests have therefore been able essentially to name their price and enforce their terms. Consequently the universal understanding today is that anyone who funds a new project can demand a controlling interest in it. This means that all large businesses are operated primarily for the interests of the stockholders, even when those interests plainly conflicts with the interests of other participants, such as the workers, the customers and the public at large. In particular the initial investors, who often have little interest the business itself, are motivated to grow the perceived value of the company so that they can maximize their profit when they sell their shares soon after going public. This pressure towards early growth is often at odds with the long-term interests of the business.

It is our inviolable principle that our invention will never be promoted in a way that maximizes income or share value, but rather one that maximizes social benefit while still yielding a fair return. The ownership of the patent rights will be vested in a foundation of a kind yet to be determined. Its charter will forbid it either to sell any kind of equity in the technology, or hypothecate it in any way. the foundation will exist only to collect and distribute the income from the intellectual property. It will also be barred (other than to the extent required for the maintenance of a prudent reserve against hard times or patent defense or the like) from investing any of the income for further financial gain. Other than running the organization itself, and suitably rewarding the founders and others that we promise benefits to, all surplus funds (which we believe will be very substantial) will be used to fund projects for social rather than financial benefits, as donations rather than loans or equity investments.

Our purpose in this is to avoid what we see as one of the fundamental flaws of the form of capitalism practiced in the world today, which is the formation of large pools of wealth that are passed down from generation to generation, causing what we see as serious social damage.

Instead we will seek to maximize the use of the invention throughout the world, especially in poorer areas that can benefit most from it, since it can be manufactured in any reasonably well equipped machine shop. We will not grant any kind of exclusive licenses, but allow anyone willing to pay a reasonable royalty to use the technology.

All of this does not mean we are against the making of money, and we believe that early investors should be very well rewarded for their participation, and we (the founders) also wish to be well rewarded for our efforts. We will achieve this by providing something of genuine value to the world, and charging a very reasonable price for it.

What we are offering investors is a ten times return on their investment, payable as soon as we reach profitability. At that point 70% of our profits will be devoted to paying off our investors until everyone has been fully reimbursed, $10 for every dollar invested. At this point the risk factors are very low. We have seen that the theory of operation is sound, and all it takes is the building of a working prototype. We can show that there is manifest need in the world for what we are offering, and the sheer number of different applications means that even if one or two markets are resistant, we will have no trouble selling it somewhere! The only risk is that inherent in any project whatever, that some completely unforeseeable calamity will occur that prevents the execution of our plan.

The form of the business will be the licensing of intellectual property, which is a well understood business model, and there are many well-established businesses in the field. We believe that we would be in a very good negotiating position, considering the vast application of our technology. Indeed I would hope that we would be in a position to demand an advance against earned royalties for giving them our business. In any case I cannot imagine that very much time would elapse between our ability to demonstrate a convincing prototype and the commencement of an income stream.

Because of all of these factors, the amount of funding that will use sufficient to reach the point of profitability is almost laughably small, such that many traditional funding sources will not even consider it. We estimate that we will need a maximum of $250,000, and would hope that we would not even need this amount. This represents a two year span, at a burn rate of some $10,500 per month. The two years is a very outside estimation of the time it should take to produce a working model and demonstrate it. The actual cost of parts is quite low; even at one-off prices the material costs (gears, shafts, machining etc) will not exceed $15,000; the remainder accounts for overhead expenses of working space, utilities and incidentals. We envisage using at least one engineering consultant on a part time basis, and a part-time administrative assistant to keep track of the paperwork. Otherwise all of the work can be accomplished by one person.

Negative Factors

A couple of cautions, but neither one is a deal-breaker.

Sprag bearings

There is one part, called a sprag bearing, of which each transmission requires two, which will wear in use and will have to be periodically replaced. This part is also the limiting factor on the speed of the input. (This limit does not significantly affect the practicability of the transmission). Sprag bearings are a common and readily available item, but the uses to which they have been put so far have not been as demanding as what we are asking them to do. Their technology has barely improved in the last few decades. They have always been good enough for the market. There is every reason to suppose that given a new and potentially very large market that demanded higher performance, this would certainly be forthcoming.

In any case, wear in this part is inevitable, and even better ones will have to be regularly replaced. Fortunately their position in the mechanism makes it simple to design units for easy replacement, and when returned to the factory as cores, they can be easily refurbished and resold. We do not view this as a major drawback; in fact since we will supply regenerative braking, we will eliminate the need to change brake pads, so we are simply replacing one maintenance task with another, probably cheaper one.

The bottom line is that what is available right now is adequate to the task, but this is the single component where improving it will improve the performance of the transmission.

User Acceptance

This factor really only applies to automotive use, and specifically to gasoline powered cars. The issue is that use of an infinitely variable transmission in a gasoline car (if one is going to use it to its best advantage) results in the engine going at a single speed (or one of two or three defined speeds), with the transmission taking care of the conversion to the required road speed. For some kinds of drivers (those who consider driving a sport rather than a chore) this lacks what one may term the “vroom-vroom” effect. It just sounds and feels boring to them, no matter that the performance is actually improved. It is similar to the reason that electric cars are excluded from drag racing: they would win all the prizes, but nobody would want to watch them without the smoke, flames and deafening roar.

Although this is mentioned frequently in articles about vehicles with continuously variable transmissions as a reason why acceptance has been slow, we do not consider it a significant factor, for the following reasons. First, we do not see gasoline powered cars as a high priority market. They are a shrinking market segment, and are a notoriously slow adopter of new technology. Although the benefits would be immense, they also require some radical rethinking of what the proper function is of the engine in the power train. Radical rethinking is not a common Detroit phenomenon.

Secondly the people who suffer from this reaction are also a shrinking market segment. They are from the days when motoring was still fun, and that is getting to be a long time ago. Younger drivers have no great expectation that their cars will be fun to drive, and those who do can get a lot of thrills in a Tesla, so “muscle cars” and their fans are literally a dying breed.

South pointing chariots

On a lighter note (but true, nonetheless)…

This project is unusual in several ways. The most salient of these is the fact that it involves an enabling technology rather than a product. This is rare in today’s world where most advances in technology involve either incremental improvements in already known techniques or large scale industrial efforts such as for instance nuclear fusion. It has been a very long time since a single unknown inventor came up with a truly new, game-changing idea. Still more unusual is that all of the knowledge required for this invention was known at the time of Archimedes. Now it is true that Archimedes would have been unlikely to have thought of it because given the state of technology at the time, an infinitely variable transmission would not have seemed to him to be a useful device. Nonetheless, anybody between then and now could have invented the Rolowitz Drive, yet nobody did.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect, however, is that this is a new technology that replaces an existing technology that is in widespread (indeed universal) use, and improves on its predecessor in every measurable attribute. It is better than what it replaces in all of the following characteristics:

Size
Weight
Complexity
Ease of manufacture
Ease of assembly
Technology level
Cost
Robustness
Scalability
Ease of control
Efficiency
Range of acceptable material
Range of applications

This is exceedingly rare. Almost all new technologies come with some kind of drawback: they need better materials, or finer tolerances, or are more expensive or high tech to build. In most cases the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but to find a case where there were really no drawbacks at all we had to reach back to 11^thCentury China, where the south pointing chariot was replaced by the magnetic compass.

China and its neighboring countries have large relatively featureless areas, and armies needed a way to determine the correct direction, and in around 500 BCE an engineer came up with a chariot that had an ingenious arrangement of gears and shafts that compensated for every turn the chariot took, and had a statuette on top with a pointing finger that always pointed south. Evidently this was sufficiently accurate to be useful, since records show that many of them were built, and indeed they may have been reinvented or substantially improved later. They were in continuous use until the 11^thCentury CE. One can only imagine the complexity, and the maintenance that must have been needed to keep them working properly. Some idea of this can be gained by reading the Wikipedia article. No doubt many efforts were made to improve them, but these efforts always started from the existing technology. Imagine the reaction when someone arrived at the palace with a piece of thread and a magnetized iron bar, and made the south pointing chariot industry entirely redundant.

We live in a world full of hitherto unrecognized south pointing chariots: automotive drivetrains, all kinds of electronic motor speed controls. We have the equivalent to the magnetic compass that will replace them with something stunningly more simple, elegant and practicable.

Who We Are

Albert Warren Brown, a California native is the inventor of the Rolowitz Drive. He has worked mostly in electronic research, particularly amplifiers, and has four US patents to his name. In addition to his talents as an inventor, he is a virtuoso pianist and composer. His inventions invariably demonstrate simple ways to achieve desirable effects, and are completely novel approaches rather than elaborations of previous techniques. When he worked as a repair technician for a high end stereo store (in the days when there were such places and components could still be repaired) he would not simply fix what had broken, but also fixed the design issue that broke it. He would often hand back a handful of parts that he had removed to make the amplifier sound better. He is truly an original thinker.

Patrick Brintonwas born into an upper middle class English family, and was given an education worthy of a gentleman, which fitted him for almost nothing in life. Fortunately he was equipped with a retentive and agile mind, and found it easy to learn whatever skills he needed to do whatever task he set himself. It has been a hallmark of his career that whatever he did, he knew nothing about it when he started. Nonetheless he has had a series of businesses that where at the very least successful in satisfying their clientele.

These included

Inpine, which made and sold high quality pine furniture, eventually branching into fully fitted kitchens, in London
Abracadabra, a stained glass studio and antique glass business in San Rafael, CA.
Patrick’s Bookshop Café, in the early ‘80s the social center of Fairfax, CA.
Interface, also in Fairfax, one of the first desktop publishing businesses in the country
A period as a computer programmer and developer of a visual computer programming language
Omega Reception Technology, a previous collaboration with Brown in the electronics field
Looks Good on Paper, in Sebastopol, CA., making high quality fine art reproductions and large format printing.

In all of these businesses he was not simply the owner but also the creator and manager (and sometimes the only employee!)

Through all of this and from a very early age he has been an avid photographer and has from time to time between businesses pursued this as a profession. For the last five years he has been spending the majority of his time (and of his very limited resources) on the present project.

Author: Rolowitz