A recent Duke University graduate says sometimes laziness may prevent someone from getting a drink. Hence his new invention: a beer- or soda-launching refrigerator.
"I think the beer-launching fridge is really cool," Abby Evans, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, said. "But I don't know what practical use it will have other than occasional amusement."
John Cornwell, the 22-year-old Duke graduate, put his engineering degree to work and created a refrigerator with an outside mechanical system that pulls a can out of the refrigerator, and at the touch of a button, catapults it across the room, according to Cornwell's Web site.
"You could probably think of better things to do with your time," Rinske Wijtmans, a freshman in the School of International Service, said.
Other students said they thought that the refrigerator would cause problems.
"It seems like someone could get very hurt with that if you can't catch," Katrina Otero, a freshman in SIS, said.
Cornwell said laziness caused him to come up with the idea.
"Have you ever gotten up off the couch to get a beer for the umpteenth time and thought, 'What if instead of me going to get the beer, the beer came to me?' Well, that was how I first conceived of the beer-launching fridge," Cornwell wrote on his Web site. "About three months and several hundred dollars later I have a fully automated, remote controlled, catapulting, man-pit approved, beer-launching mini-fridge."
The refrigerator can throw up to 10 beers without reloading, and has room for up to 14 more. Cornwell hopes to produce a limited number of refrigerators based on interest. Each refrigerator would cost about $1,500, though he plans to make a few improvements, such as increasing the size to store more cans and to improve the remote control to be able to control the angle at which the refrigerator launches the beer, according to Cornwell's Web site.
His invention has captured the interest of many and led to Cornwell appearing on the "Late Show with David Letterman." In addition, a satirical article written by Marvin Durai on the Indolink Web site described Cornwell's invention as "a contraption that may eventually be considered the greatest invention of the 21st century: the beer-throwing fridge. It's an invention that could dramatically improve the lives of college students everywhere"
