Revealed: The Brit-built GRAVITY-powered light that costs $5
An ingenious gravity-powered light source has reached its first funding goal in four days. Co-invented by industrial designer Martin Riddiford - who crafted Psion's hardware - the cheap kit allows an LED to be run for 30 minutes from a three-second pull on a rope. Gravity does the rest. The GravityLight was devised with …
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Re: @ Mr Chriz 12:17
I took antibiotics once in my life. Had a severe reaction to them and have never taken them again.
That said modern medicine is I believe a fantastic thing - and I wouldn't want to put anyone down who is involved in the research of such medicines . You can (with a bit of luck) live or at least have a life without it though and billions have done so before.
Industrial Sewage Systems are also undoubtedly one of the best inventions known to man. That said there's a again a hell of a lot of people managing just fine without. In places that are not over populated this is not such a big problem. Where the mud hut was shown I doubt they'd have a problem. Fresh water is more of a problem .. something i am always happy to help see resolved. Some of the large cities like in India where sewage is more problematic... I wouldn't like to live like that. Maybe much of the reason for that population density is possibly where they are pushing for western ideals.. (I'm no historian though so feel free to point me wrong).
I don't have all the answers for sure. It's sure good to know everyone else is so happy in their box offices and houses and the constant rush. That the endless supply of goods from slaves in China or where ever is enough to keep everyone going.
To start pushing our consumerism on other cultures though does scare me.
When these light devices break who will recycle them? I've visited one village who were making significant money from travelers. They started buying mobile phones and other electronic items. When they stopped working they'd throw the phones on the floor - expecting it to decompose like everything else in their lives.
Before long these places could become a dirty plastic dumping ground...kind of like around here actually...
The gravity light on it's own does sound like a great invention - simple and effective. Maybe on reflection such devices do have a place - where interference has already been too great. On the edge of Cape town there's people connecting their own power cables up to live electricity pylons to pinch electric for their televisions (probably donated innocently by someone thinking it can't do any harm (KZZZRT?!)
Maybe with a few years of dev they can produce a gravity powered TV?!
I stand by my original comment though... you don't need it in a mud hut.
Get down voting :-P
Attracting malaria?
Funny - I thought malaria pre-dated artificial lighting. I always thought that those pesky mozzies fount their way around by sense of smell. The moment you turn the light on, that annoying meeeeeeeee noise stops, and you can't find the bloody insect to swat. Maybe that's only Italian hotel mozzies, though. Or maybe you are confusing mozzies with moths?
That aside, wouldn't people be happier with more usable hours in their day? Eight hours sleep is plenty, but the sun is down for twelve-ish hours (near the equator). Which is why they use fires or candles for light, which is wasteful, hazardous, and smoke inhalation is a long-term killer.
Mozzy correction
What if LEDs don't attract mosquitos? (Which is what it says on the gravitylight website).
There must be some vaguely plausible criticism.
THINK man, THINK.
Re: "More western technologies to corrupt their ways of living"
> Weapons, disease, torture, brutal dictatorships, apartheid, colonisation, enslavement, segregation - you're complaining about giving them *this*?
They had all of these things before the west got there.
Do you really think Africa was a wonderful paradise where everybody lived in peace and love before the west got there?
The tribes of Africa have been fighting and enslaving each other for centuries.
Corrupt their way of living
Yeah, like it was westerners who first thought that having a light source when sun went down was a Good Thing (tm) ?
But aren't mosquitoes attracted by...
carbon dioxide? That's what I always thought.
You see it as bringing medicine, food, electricity, roads, and telecommunications to these poor bastards scrabbling in the dirt.
They see it as bringing smallpox, gambling, alcohol, drugs, racism, marginalization, despair, and suicide to a culture that was doing fine without your fancy gadgets (and now that they know about them, can't afford them anyway), kthxbai.
Mind you, the original damage of colonization is already done. So may as well give them cheap light to educate themselves by at night.
Re: @ Mr Chriz 12:17
Well I have had to take antibiotics more than once, and not for just I have a cold reasons but because without them I would have been in serious trouble. I think you'll find generally they save more lives than kill.
Admittedly mud huts probably don't need great sewage systems, and clean water is more useful. I was maybe using hyperbole to point out with that and hot tropics that the amount of nasty things you can catch and be infected by goes up, and that some western things are definitely useful.
As far as lighting goes, I have never noticed it to make that much difference with body heat, and smell mosquitoes find you in various ways, and I have been bitten in the dark plenty of times.
I'm pretty sure decent lighting at night is quite a useful thing though, it tends to get dark early and the sun goes down fast. If you can find a good argument for not being able to choose when you need to see easily then fire away.
@Arnold
"You think "they" didn't have such things before white man came along? Really?"
Guns- No, these were a "western" concept - sure we gave them out to whichever indigenous communities we thought would use them *with* us rather than against us - but we only gave them to the tribes/communities we liked. As a result those with guns found they could decimate their opponents (and in cases where we gave them to everyone; each other.)
Disease - Yes, we gave 3rd world countries a lot of our diseases. Not that they didn't have any of their own - but they had a modicum of immunity to theirs. It was the introduction of western diseases such as smallpox that devastated communities of 3rd world countries who had no exposure.
torture - sure, all humans could inflict pain on each other - but it took people such as King Leopold II to truly show how brutal humans could be. Whilst cutting the arms off people who didn't work hard enough in the rubber plantations could be filed under "brutal dictatorship" (which is, for the most part, how the Belgian Congo was run) I'd say it also fits pretty well under "enslavement" too (although I think we've got plenty of examples of how the west has given Africa slavery).
Colonisation - I'm sure there were conflicts and attempts at wiping each other out amongst local tribes before we came along, but never with the kind of force or scale that we used. The fact that many African nations now speak French or a variation of Dutch demonstrates what sort of effect we've had.
Apartheid - Seriously? You think native africans came up with this?!
Segregation - Not only in places such as the U.S, where Africans were considered to be lower class humans (and not even citizens for a long time) but in Africa as well - In Rwanda the genocide of the Tutsi's at the hands of the Hutu was in no small part due to the efforts of colonists deciding, based on arbitrary physical attributes (which, admittedly, did have some basis in tribal history, but was still no basis on which to decide which people were "better") to decide who would effectively be upper and lower class citizens.
These are things that we "gave" them.
Not reading history books doesn't change history.
Re: Attracting mosquitoes
Use a red light and you might attract "clients"!
Re: @Arnold
"Not reading history books doesn't change history."
Reading only selected histories doesn't change it either. Guns, Maybe I'd agree but they are only a better weapon. Weapons are pretty much indigenous everywhere. Colonization, slavery, bigotry, hatred, disease, every location has their own home grown varieties. What the west did was to industrialize the whole thing.
Re: Attracting mosquitoes
It's the CO2 that attracts mosquitoes, not the light.
Re: Attracting mosquitoes
"insects can't see red"
I wouldn't necessarily say that, when I disturbed a wasps' nest in my attic a couple of years ago its occupants certainly did! :)
Smart in so many ways...
Okay, it's the same principle that powers grandfather clocks, but this is genius. A lovely touch is supplying the light in a bag that becomes the power weight...
Boffinry at its best.
Pedantry...
... but it isn't actually "gravity-powered", it's powered by whatever initially overcomes the force of gravity to lift the weight.
Re: Pedantry...
That's like saying that it's actually nuclear powered because ultimately the thing that gave it the potential energy (by lifting it) got its own energy from the sun (indirectly, via plants and possibly animals). The sun being one big nuclear reactor, this little LED is actually nuclear.
On a less obtuse note, are you saying that 'battery powered' devices aren't, because the batteries have to be charged by something else?
Re: Pedantry...
But the weight has some gravity too, so it pulls itself back down to the floor...*
*Might not be actual science.
Re: ... batteries have to be charged by something else
Batteries are not charged, batteries are assembled.
Re: Pedantry...
You're right, this device is nuclear fusion powered. Whoever lifted that weight ate plants (or meat that ate plants) that were powered by the sun.
Re: Pedantry...
So, you actually mean it was Big Bang powered?
Re: Pedantry...
and how do you think that the nuclear fusion reactor that is the sun got started in the first place (and contributes to keep it running)?
gravity ;)
Oh Great!
> An ingenious gravity-powered light source
Now we're going to start using up all the gravity. At least with oil, when it runs out, we don't all float off into spaaaaaace.
Re: Oh Great!
This is what the Mayan's tried to warn us about...
Re: Oh Great!
@Pete2: Comment of the month, I salute you, sir!
Re: Oh Great!
Thank you for cheering me up on a crappy cold grey day.
Pull the other one...
...it's got a gravity-powered-LED-light on.
Lovely guy, a great cause, but that voice has me looking up flights to Dignitas.
Shouldn't that be ...
muscle-powered light ?
Nonetheless neat - is it an improvement on a wind-up light/radio/etc though ?
Nice idea but sack the sub-editor
could save people relying on biomass fuels such as kerosene, which are bad for one's health
er, since when has kerosene been considered biomass? Anyway, it isn't directly bad for one's health, neither is the dung that is burn for heat and light. The problems start with the soot caused by burning them inefficiently in enclosed spaces.
Solar for lights isn't that expensive and there are several projects which are installing low-cost solar generators, which make a great deal of sense in much of the third world. Given Andrew's generally sceptical views on climate change the article is slightly ironic as people like Amory Lovins have been banging on about giving cheap, reliable and low power renewable technology for the third world for, er, decades.
Still, it's a good project and I hope it does well.
Re: Nice idea but sack the sub-editor
"er, since when has kerosene been considered biomass?"
Well, you can make biokerosene, which is what Andrew was driving at. And kerosene isn't particularly great for you, either. I've simplified the sentence for you.
C.
Re: Nice idea but sack the sub-editor
I guess all kerosene comes from biomass, the question being whether it took millions of years and some refining to get there...
Re: Nice idea but sack the sub-editor
Yes, you could install solar powered units, but they need batteries, which break down and need replacements after a while... Maybe they could make the solar units power a small electrical motor to pull the weight up? Nah.... KISS!
Re: Nice idea but sack the sub-editor
"Solar for lights isn't that expensive "
For the western world it isn't. For the developing world, a bit more. Plus, solar panels can't be fixed or rebuilt, and to provide light when the sun isn't there, require batteries which also lose efficiency / need maintenance / replacing.
A mechanical contraption like this is a lot more robust and easy to maintain. No reason a device like this couldn't work for scores of years* , even taking into account changing teh LED every 10 years or so.
*unless it was built to built-in-obsolescence specs as most technology for westerners' consumption seems to be these days
Re: Nice idea but sack the sub-editor
Well, you can make biokerosene, which is what Andrew was driving at.
"Biokerosene"? In the third world? If they have got the process to do that in the wild then they don't need lamps like that. Kerosene from biomass is generally associated with greenwashing/tax efficient strategies from the aviation industry. It's plain and simple paraffin for that lovely, sooty flame.
Re: Re: Nice idea but sack the sub-editor
Fine, point taken. I'll just take my P45.
C.
One word...
Genius!
Why was this not thought of before, it is that simple!?
This is what the patent system is for, very much in the spirit of Trevor Baylis.
Re: One word...
This is NOT what the patent system is for. If this gets a patent then the new European Patent system is well and truly fscked. And if these "inventors" apply for a patent, then they're as bad as all the patent trolls that came before them.
This is bleeding obvious and there's a ton of prior art.
This is what the patent system is for ...
This is exactly the thing the patent system was supposed to prevent: wasting good ideas on people who can't pay for it. But while running lights may be fine and dandy, charging mobile phones surely is not! Or have the guys at Apple forgotten to patent that one?
While we are at it, let me be the first to file:
- "Storage of energy by moving an object in a gravitational (or other) field"
- "Conversion of mechanical energy to electrical energy via a generator"
- "Use of gravity to exert a constant force on a weight"
Well gosh
Not really gravity powered. Muscle power has to hoist the weight in the first place (is a cuckoo clock Gravitty powered?), All this does is allow the energy to be metered out slowly.
Someone might want to replace the rope/counterweight with a windmill/waterwheel/hamster
Re: Well gosh
"Not really gravity powered. Muscle power has to hoist the weight"
Yes, but honestly, isn't gravity-powered a bit more interesting, surprising and still accurate? Muscle-powered could mean anything. A hamster on a spinning wheel is muscle power. This is something cooler.
C.
Re: Well gosh
Now then, you may be on to something! Replace hamster with your own local livestock of choice e.g. live near the Serengeti? Replace hamster with Cheetah (scale wheel to suit, but how much power?). Maybe not much torque but pretty good speed. When will they harness the power of the annual Wildebeast migration (I'm thinking travelators along all those crocodile infested rivers they have to cross, but you would have to react the force applied by Wildebeat running from croc. into the travelator some how). Scoobee Doo springs to mind....
Re: Well gosh
it'll cost more to feed an ox/elephant than to buy the AA needed.
Re: Well gosh
But you still need gravity to actually make the thing work. You can use muscle power to put a weight up on a hook on a tree, but once it's there, it's not doing anything. Get it?
Re: Well gosh
I would say the light is gravity powered. The unit has a store of gravitational potential energy which it converts to light. Yes, the unit is "charged up" using muscle power, but that is no more sensible than saying that my wireless mouse is steam powered because the batteries in it where charged up using electricity from Didcot Power Station.
cheetah wheel
It sounds crazy but I have seen a wheel for a bengal cat (part domestic, part asian leopard cat)
Re: Well gosh
>When will they harness the power of the annual Wildebeast migration (I'm thinking travelators along all those crocodile infested rivers they have to cross, but you would have to react the force applied by Wildebeat running from croc. into the travelator some how)
Best. Episode. Of Gladiators. Ever.
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