via Ecoart Blog.
A beautifully crafted and humorous piece that stimulates ideas of the potential energy inherent in our everyday machines. Of course this works off of the idea of embodied energy in the last post. It is fascinating that the physical structure of the wood grains at a microscopic level provides the elastic memory that allows the slinky action of the coil to function, and that physical structure is the embodied energy utilized during the creation of the complex cellulose from the energy of sunlight. The electricity used to run the escalator continuously for our hyper-convenience is also (sadly) taken from that same process, only from trees that died millions of years ago and the cellulose of which was compressed into anthracite coal.
