Just about every purely mechanical mechanism can be constructed from the six simple machines. These include the inclined plane, wedge, lever, wheel and axle, screw, and pulley. These days, most mechanisms are known as compound machines, which combine two or more of these simple machines to achieve their intended function. When I think about compound machines, a couple come to mind. The wiley wheelbarrow, the shifty shovel, the sex-, the sensu-, the streamlined scissors. However, I believe one compound machine trumps them all: the wine corkscrew. You can find one in every real adult household, the mechanical ones are pretty cheap, and you generally feel GREAT after using it. Not only that but, depending on how loose your definitions are, these babies pack no less than THREE simple machines.
Before I delve into a breakdown of the corkscrew, allow me to paint a picture of what happens when you don’t have one handy in times of need. You’re at your friend’s 21st Birthday Party and of course there is wine present. Alas, there is no wine opener anywhere in the apartment. So what is one to do? Being an engineer, you try to apply a more rudimentary simple machine to the task. You take a key, wedge it into the cork, and try to lever the cork out. You give the cork a shaved head and cry. Had this been the days of the Romans, you would have just gone at the amphora with a hammer and elbow grease. Alas, we have evolved, and so too has our technology.
Now that we have outlined the use cases for wine corkscrews and their sheer necessity in the modern day (especially after your last exam did not buy you flowers afterward), I will delve into the diagram prepared by a definitely attractive, smart, funny, and cool person. As I mentioned earlier, a simple lever or wedge just won’t do to remove a cork. I don’t know about you, but I am not the biggest fan of cork in my mouth, even after a couple of glasses of wine. The aptly named corkscrew thus features a screw to neatly drill the cork with no clean-up required. The screw doubled as a worm gear, which turns the spur gears at the end of the handles. As the screw is turned, the handles are raised. The handles’ length acts to amplify the force of your hands to be much larger than what pulling straight up on the cork by inducing a moment on the cork. A moment, simply put, is just a force multiplied by the distance away from a pivot point. Once the screw has been completely burrowed into the cork, one can use the mechanical advantage of the levers to hoist the cork, which has very little means to resist aside from friction, right out of the neck of the bottle.
I mentioned that corkscrews contain at least three simple machines, but I have only mentioned two thus far. This is where we need to do a little bit of abstraction. A spur gear is nothing more than a bunch of levers smacked on the circumference of a wheel and axle. The levers allow for force to be transmitted than through friction and tension alone in the case of a pulley. In a similar manner, worm gears can be viewed as one long lever wrapped around a cylindrical shaft, in much the same way a screw is one long wedge wrapped around a cone. Congratulations, my dear reader! You now have learned or have been reminded of how a wine corkscrew works. As a reward for writing this, I think I’ll go put a corkscrew to good use. If you’re of age, I recommend you do so as well. Happy Friday! See you all in two weeks where I’ll be talking about bicycle gears or something like that.
