.... being addicted to a shortly lived but intensely loved by some, television show in the 60's called "Dark Shadows". The introduction always showed Barnabas Collins, the vampire of lore, walking among the creepiest fog crawling around tombstones and I found the image irresistible. Many years later, after becoming interested in Halloween decorating for my young sons, I thought how wonderful it would be to have such awesome low lying fog for my haunted yard.

That's when I found out that either I needed thousands of dollars to purchase a unit that made smoke that cold, or I would have to hassle with dry ice and smoke machines. Of course, this wasn't appealing to me at the time raising young kids with little money to spend and less time to work on dealing with the difficulties of dry ice.

I had read enough about dry ice to know that you can't touch it with bare skin or it will burn your, you can't store it in the freezer, because it is so much colder than the temperature inside that it tricks the freezer into believing it doesn't have to kick on again, and ends up allowing the food to spoil. I also learned that even though it would work to make awesome, gorgeous fog, it would only last a few moments and then the dry ice would freeze the water around it and cease to create fog. And worse, even if you were able to get the dry ice to keep from melting using a heating element and moving the water enough, there was no way to get the fog out to my yard without putting the 55 gallon drum of warmed water and dry ice there and ruining the cemetery scene. By this time I had already learned that trying to move fog with a fan only destroyed the fog. So with that, I turned to ice cubes.

I spent many hours researching ice cube answers to chilling hot smoke from smoke machines and eventually learned that the best results that had been achieved so far after decades of theater, special effects and Halloween enthusiasts attempting to build a homemade ice chest cooler was warm smoke that would hang sort of lower after traveling across the ice, but in the process the mass of smoke would be reduced by at least 80% from what seemed to exit the fog machine.

This set me out on a ten year journey of trying one new way after another trying to fashion some way of coaxing smoke around enough ice to actually cool it down enough to lay on the ground even in the cold night air of the last day in October. It started with my new "breakthrough" of running the fog THROUGH the ice by simply putting the duct from the fogger through the walls of an ice chest and filling the chest with ice. I admit now that it worked to a very tiny degree, but there were real problems. The fog wasn't really cold when it came out and oddly, there was far less fog coming out than going in.

I turned to muffin fans, because the Halloween community assured me that if you want to move fog, that's the way to do it. So I set up in-line muffin fans to help push the fog through chests of ice. I attempted small hoses, larger hoses, heating duct to help increase the loss of cold from the ice surrounding it. These were all the same as before. Warm mist.

In another "breakthrough" moment, I decided that sucking the fog through a container of ice, using a vacuum cleaner as the source of energy and having the hose from the vacuum travel from inside the center of the container, I would make it impossible for the fog to go anywhere other than fully through the ice mass and thus creating fog as cold as ice. Of course this system worked as well as all the other ones. Warm mist and not much of it.

After ten years of prototypes and more tests of trying to herd chickens with a rope, the Vortex system presented itself in the most amazing way as the entire process seemed to defy physics. And to this day I am convinced that I would have never seen the Vortex work had it not been that on that day, after a marathon of entire days all strung together of one vain and crazy test after another, the final test was ridiculous in theory. But since there simply weren't any other ways left, I tried it out of desperation and certainly not out of one of my "breakthrough" epiphanies that had led to that moment.

I suppose some of our best inventions really did come out of accidentally discovering how nature wanted things done. But nonetheless, the Vortex really does work and in a much bigger way than I had ever imagined. To achieve even a one to one ratio of fog coming from the chiller would have been universally chided as dreaming, but to have the fog chill to below the temperature of the ice itself and come out 5x the volume left every one of my friends dumbfounded that day, with me right along with them.

Something that few know and probably even fewer actively are curious about is where the Vortex system got its name. And i have to say that it wasn't from me. When we removed the lid from final prototype to witness the transformation of the hot smoke into cold and also the creation of the real fog, we were all equally amazed to see that there was indeed an actual vortex that had been created inside the system that was the reason the test had worked in the first place, even though it apparently defied the laws of physics. The fog, after being not just coaxed, but instantly forced all the way through a massive, foot deep of ice cubes, continued to use the energy from the expanding gasses that were being multiplied through endothermic sublimation which forced the fog through a small vortex at the top of the ice. Of course we know now that this energy is enough to power huge fog curtains and push soup-thick fog for dozens and even hundreds of feet with no fans of any kind. But at the time it was more than just amazing and much greater than I had ever hoped for.

Chilli