Blast From the Past: The Cavitron

When I was a kid, I used to love reading old issues of Popular Mechanics from the ’50s and ’60s. Yeah, the space-age retro-chic was cool, but what always fascinated me was the huge number of “next big things”, all the predictions of “by 1965, every household in the world will own one”, which had completely failed to materialize. I’m not talking about cool stuff that had their glory days and then disappeared (spirit duplicators, anyone?), but the cool stuff that, in today’s parlance, “never made it out of beta”. I still want an electromagnetic rail gun… but I digress.

Anyway, it seems that Popular Mechanics and the various, competing geek magazines of the era weren’t the only ones that featured soon-to-be-forgotten technical wonders. Buried deep in the Life photo archive are around one hundred images a machine called the Cavitron, and the people - apparently - responsible for it.

That is a corkscrew, obviously. What’s not quite so obvious is that it’s been embedded into a solid block of glass. Not bad, considering it was done in July, 1952; I think most of us would be hard-pressed to achieve anything similar, today.

Of course, we don’t have Cavitron ultrasonic milling machines…

From what I can tell, the Cavitron was just what the name implied: an ultrasonic machine tool. They’re still around, I think, but since you never see corkscrews embedded in blocks of glass anymore, or similar sorts of things, I can only imagine that the whole “trick” involved has been forgotten in the last half-century. From what I can fathom from the photos and their cryptic captions (when there are captions!), it’s as simple as attaching something to a large, ultrasonic motor, then placing it against a surface and adding a slurry of water and a fine abrasive (pumice? aluminum oxide?), and waiting a little bit.

So, since I love resurrecting old and useless technologies, and a lot of you bored college students are coming up on your holiday breaks, anyone want to try and reproduce these shennanigans? Even if you don’t have access to an ultrasonic mill (who does?), I’d be interested to see what some enterprising engineering student could do to a beer bottle with an ultrasonic toothbrush, a power supply, some valve-lapping compound, a steel razor blade, and some time. Hint, hint…

Pictures and other forms of awesomeness to the usual address, if you’re actually crazy enough to try this.