‘Turbo Mule’ wins student invention competition

Students Brie Howley (left), Dave Watters (far right) and Eric Wobig tinker with their Turbo Mule.

Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about carrying items from one place to another. Three students who did have won $10,000 for their effort.

A device known as the Turbo Mule won the first prize at this year’s annual competition Brainstorm: the Schoofs Prize for Creativity, which crowns the best invention from undergraduate students and is hosted by the College of Engineering.

The human-powered Turbo Mule, built by students Brie Howley, Dave Waters and Eric Wobig, is intended to provide inexpensive transportation capable of easing the workload of people in Third World countries. “In the African nation of Ghana, approximately 70 percent of all time and 80 percent of all human effort is spent transporting agricultural materials,” says Waters. “A lot of that is carried on women’s heads. Turbo Mule could relieve a lot of that burden.”

Although conceived as an aid to people in underdeveloped countries, the inventors say the vehicle could also be used as a taxi, factory cart or recreational vehicle just about anywhere.

Brainstorm awards cash prizes to undergraduates whose inventions are judged most creative, novel, innovative, patentable and likely to succeed in the marketplace. The contest is sponsored by Richard J. Schoofs, chairman of Schoofs, Inc.

Laura Jensen, Patrick Maquire, Chad Vande Hei and Vidya Balakrishnan won second place with The Up-Lift, a device to safely lower and raise a person from a wheelchair-accessible toilet. Third place went to Scott Kurszewski’s Hold It, a quick-release, self-locking clamp used to secure a snowmobile to a trailer.

Judges for this year’s competition included representatives from Soft Switching Technologies, Oscar Mayer, Foley and Lardner and the Wisconsin Small Business Development Center.