Evolving the Corkscrew: A TRIZ-based Hypothesis
By Dana W. Clarke, Sr., President and CEO
Applied Innovation Alliance, LLC
West Bloomfield, MI , USA
(248) 366-0910
www.aia-consulting.com
This brief article demonstrates how several key principles of TRIZ—Ideality,
Contradictions, Systems Approach Thinking and Patterns of Evolutions (including
resource utilization, uneven development of systems, increasing dynamics, increased
controllability, increasing complexity followed by simplification, matching and
mismatching of system elements, transition to the micro-level, increased use of fields,
and decreased human involvement) might have been used to invent the corkscrew.
A question
Which came first, the cork or the corkscrew? Textbooks tell us that the plain truth is:
corkscrews were conceived for corks. But on reading this, the TRIZ student should
immediately say: wait a minute, didn’t the mechanism already exist? And the TRIZ
student would of course be right. After all, didn’t a guy named Archimedes invent the
screw, and wasn’t it being used centuries before wine bottles or their corks became
common in early 18th century?
The mechanism in question is the Archimedes screw, a device designed for lifting
water for irrigation and drainage purposes. In fact, it is one of the oldest
machines still in use. Its invention has traditionally been credited to Archimedes
(circa 287-212 B.C.). Diodorus Siculus, a Roman historian active in the first
century B.C. wrote: “men easily irrigate the whole of it [an island in the delta of
the Nile] by means of a certain instrument conceived by Archimedes of Syracuse,
and which gets its name [cochlias] because it has the form of a spiral or screw.”
Roots of the corkscrew
The evolution of bottles as a storage mechanism for wine led to the need for materials to
seal them. That wine, and other bottled fluids such as perfume and medicines, would be
consumed defined the need for devices that would help users extract the sealing mate