It looks like an oversize eggbeater, but Professor Gorlov thinks his turbine can change the world.
It seems impossible that anything of technological significance could emerge from the basement of Richards Hall, the engineering building of Northeastern University in Boston. It is a haphazard warren, home to discarded office chairs, old lockers, and unclaimed pencils, all covered in a coat of fine gray dust. But it is also the home of the Hydro-Pneumatic Power Laboratory, where a 73-year-old Russian-born mechanical engineering professor named Alexander Gorlov spent a decade redesigning one of the world's oldest and simplest machines, the turbine.
Smiling, Gorlov walks over to a cluttered corner of the lab and wheels out a gurney. Strapped to it is an object that looks remarkably like an oversize beater from an old hand-held mixer. Still, this is it, the Gorlov Helical Turbine, which may someday help turn hydroelectric power into one of the most important and environmentally benign renewable energy sources on the planet. Gorlov's turbine received the 2001 Thomas A. Edison Patent Award, given each year by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which hailed its potential "to alleviate the world-wide crisis in energy."