Hey there;
Oh, that guy? His name is Goldberg; Rube was his grandfather. 
There are a couple of styles of swifts. The umbrella swift opens and closes like an umbrella, and the yarn wraps around the parts that cross. The Amish swift is like a large, wooden plus sign that sits on a table, and has a number of holes drilled part way into all four arms for pegs so as to accommodate varying sized skeins. Yarn can be wound onto or from either of these styles. There is also a weasel . It's a tall, narrow box on 4 short legs, and a wooden gear system inside. Attached to the front of the box is a hub with 6 or 8 spokes radiating from it, and each of these has a fixed dowel attached to the ends at 90 degree angles. One of the spokes has a dowel at about it's midway point, also at a 90 degree angle, and serves as a crank. The weasel is best for winding only, as it isn't adjustable like the other two. However the mechanism inside counts rotations and when some number is reached, "pop goes the weasel".
There are, of course, variations on all of these. The pedal-powered swift is not among them, and is a unique sort of device to be sure. It doesn't appear to be adjustable, occupies a considerable amount of floor space as compared to the other three, and is bound to make all passers by at the county fair's sheep to wool contest smile. With the exception of the steam, any of the other swifts will do the same thing. The in-line steamer is aimed at de-kinking the unraveled sweater yarn, I think. Some folk take a more pedestrian approach when they wash it.
The gadget I'm messing with isn't a swift. It's meant to split a 4 ply yarn into two 2 ply yarns, or four 1 ply yarns. The lady I'm making it for was my high school art teacher a whole bunch of years ago. She has struggled for years with a degenerative form of arthritis, and leaves her wheel chair only for moments at a time. The splitter I'm making is designed to sit between the arms of her chair on her lap. She has spent days hand splitting the yarn from a single sweater. There are at least two large improvements I still want to make, but she's down to about 3 hours now to split the plies of a sweater. I'd like to cut that in half again.