from Wikipedia:

“In its earliest form, the capstan consisted of a timber mounted vertically through a vessel’s structure which was free to rotate. Levers, known as bars, were inserted through holes at the top of the timber and used to turn the capstan. A rope wrapped several turns around the drum was thus hauled upon. A rudimentary ratchet was provided to hold the tension. The ropes were always wound in a clockwise direction (seen from above)…
Capstans evolved to consist of a wooden drum or barrel mounted on an iron axle. Two barrels on a common axle were used frequently to allow men on two decks to apply force to the bars. Later capstans were made entirely of iron, with gearing in the head providing a mechanical advantage when the bars were pushed counterclockwise. One form of capstan was connected by a shaft and gears to an anchor windlass on the deck below….”

Here is an interesting link:

àhttp://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://manthecapstan.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/capstan.gif&imgrefurl=http://manthecapstan.wordpress.com/about/&h=297&w=324&sz=20&tbnid=HILPYBCqzaUP7M:&tbnh=108&tbnw=118&prev=/images%3Fq%3DCapstan&usg=__f6JkxkKjbNTW4KlAojR3cnFDYsk=&ei=NxUfS_WnB86GlAfwqcGJDA&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=5&ct=image&ved=0CBwQ9QEwBA

Obviously if you think of the island as an anchored ship, by turning the capstan, Ben has ‘hauled up the anchor’ at least partially and dislodged it in time.

However we see the capstan has fallen off its axle before it completes its job and the ‘anchor’ is dragging on the ‘sea bottom’ for awhile, hitting the bottom and then get dragged loose by the force of the ocean current.

Quite possible that the nautical metaphore was deliberate on the part of Darlton.

We’ve only seen one side of the wheel mechanism….who’s to say the other side isn’t the inside of a spaceship from the future that crashes into the past…surely made of metal…and aide to the magnetic freezing process.

I had this theory a long long time ago that a spaceship from the future (with time travel capability) crashed into the past into the ocean in the same spot that the main island exists as we know it but it hadn’t formed yet. The crash caused the very first time “flash” and flashed the ship into a future time when the island was formed via volcano. The spaceship and the island were merged together and since the spaceship had time travel capability – the merge left the island itself with time travel capability.

The wheel looks like it came from a pirate ship because the original steering device was damaged in the crash and the wheel we’ve seen actually did come from The Black Rock in a repair attempt by the futurities who piloted the ship.

All these different forms of transportation keep crashing on the island: the black rock, the balloon, yemi’s plane, a sailboat, 815, so wouldn’t it be fitting that the guts of the island, the “specialness” of the island, also comes from a crash of some sort?

I followed the link but had trouble understanding the particulars of the article. The gist of it is that

a) magnetic based refrigeration was a theory dating back to 1880 and has steadily advanced to the practical and proving stages through the 20s 30s and to today.

b) you need a magnetic source and a refrigerable (?) subject, usually of some metal that has thermal conductivity

c) If you want to retain the cold in an enclosed environment you have to isolate it and remove anything that can act as a heat sink.

Is that about it?

The Donkey Wheel is made of wood but is contained in an isolated chamber. When Chang’s men break into the chamber bad things happen. It can be assumed that they blocked up the holes they had started to drill. So how do they drain energy from the chamber to power the teleportation lab? and how do they send energy down the pipe to keep the Wheel frozen, especially in the absence of anything metallic to conduct thermally?

Let’s think about magnetic based refrigeration, which is already used to achieve cryogenic temperatures in the laboratory setting (below 10K) (WIKIPEDIA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration).

Maybe the freezing of the chamber/wheel was unintentional and also impossible to prevent due to its proximity to an energy source presumed to be magnetic.

What happened to Annie? Was she one of the first test subjects for the teleportation chamber in the Orchid? Now she has the head of a fly and buzzes around calling Hurley’s name?