By day, Nathan Ball is a mechanical-engineering graduate student working to improve needle-free injection technology. In his free time, he’s an inventing superhero who cohosts a reality show on PBS. In February, the 23-year-old won this year’s $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventiveness.
Batman’s best tool, in Ball’s opinion, is the grappling hook that allows him to scale tall buildings quickly. In real life, such a tool could prove invaluable. A fast firefighter weighed down with gear takes six minutes to reach a building’s 30th floor by stairs, and it’s a tiring trip. Ball and a group of MIT students have started a company to make a climbing device that uses a rope-handling mechanism he conceived. Once a rope is set in place, the tool can carry a person with heavy equipment up a building from the ground to the 30th floor in 30 seconds.
The Atlas Powered Rope Ascender can carry more than 250 pounds at a top speed of 10 feet per second. Atlas Devices, the student-run company behind the ascender, has a contract with the U.S. Army to manufacture it. The Atlas can’t shoot a rope up to the top of a building, but Ball says the army already uses grappling hooks to set ropes that soldiers must climb by hand.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
