Land yacht carries student to $10,000

Madison Thomas Swetish, a 22-year-old student, has won the $10,000 top award for his entry in the first Schoofs' Prize for Creativity competition at the University of Wisconsin Madison College of Engineering.

The senior mechanical engineering student entered a lightweight, collapsible land yacht.

Land yachts are popular recreational vehicles in the West. When on wheels, they cruise the wide open spaces. When fitted with runners, they become ice boats.

Swetish, who grew up in Colorado but now lives in Racine, said winning the contest was forcing him to rethink his career plans.

"I was expecting to graduate and get a job in a big company. But winning the prize makes me realize (the land yacht) is something I should develop," he said.

However, the prospect of learning about business, marketing and law to do that is "kind of scary," he said.

Swetish said he already had received a call from the owner of a Madison-area machine shop who expressed interest in making the land yacht, which he said could be sold for $500.

The seven other student prize winners and their projects are:

Chris Hamilton and Martin Radue, $7,000, a rotary-valve cylinder head for an internal- combustion engine; Jonas Zahn, $4,000, a swimming-pool heater- deck; Mary Poupore, $1,000, a portable device to fill syringes with insulin for diabetics; Lewis Clark, $1,000, a novel photocatalytic cell; Kervin Krause, $1,000, a magnetic slip ring; David Overbo, $1,000, a manufacturing process for stained-light polarizers; and Matt Younkle and Mickey Ellis, $1,000, super transducers.

The contest, designed to encourage students to be inventors and teach them how to protect ideas, was sponsored by Richard Schoofs, owner of a California chemical company and a UW Madison alumnus.

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