But there's always a better way to do things, and one California company believes it's come up with a design that cuts down markedly on noise, lasts longer, manages heat better and drops the total cost of ownership as much as 20 percent while using no oil.

The Carnot compressor uses a strange centrifugal process to vastly cut down the number of moving parts in the device. It's inspired, the team tells me, by a sixteenth-century device called a trompe, which used the force and weight of falling water, suffused with air bubbles, to compress the air and force it through a pipe with no moving parts whatsoever. These were commonly used in mining, as well as being a signature element of forges in Catalonia.

A trompe needs to be huge to create any real pressure, though – one built at Ragged Chute, Ontario, uses a 345-foot (105-metre) drop to create just 128 psi, so the Carnot team looked to another way of accelerating bubbly water to achieve the same effect, and arrived at a centrifuge.

So, the Carnot compressor sucks in air through a filter at the top, and mixes it with water at the top of a fast-spinning drum. The faster you spin it, the heavier the water gets, much like swinging a bucket of water around your head. Thus, the water squashes and compresses the air, and the mixture is forced out the bottom, getting separated into compressed air and water as it passes through the exit channels.