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Wednesday, February 26, 2014
by Andrew Lampard at Yahoo! News:
Ann Makosinski was just another
teenager with another science project when she joined her local science
fair in Victoria, Canada, last year. Her invention, a flashlight that is
powered solely from hand heat, took second place at the competition.
Ann, 16, and her parents, both of
whom are HAM radio operators and like to fiddle with electronics, were
satisfied with that result.
“It’s a very simple project,”
said Arthur Makosinski, Ann’s father. “It has four electrical
components. Let’s move on and do something different.”
Think about that for a moment: a
flashlight that shines for as long as you hold onto it. No more
scrambling for and chucking away AA batteries. It could have an
immediate impact on more than 1.2 billion people -- one-fifth of the
world’s population -- who, according to the World Bank, lack regular
access to electricity.
Two years ago, Ann, who is
half-Filipino, was corresponding with a friend of hers in the
Philippines who didn’t have electricity. According to Ann, her friend
couldn’t complete her homework and was failing in school.
Ann got to work. She remembered hearing human beings described as walking 100-volt light bulbs: “I thought, why not body heat? We have so much heat radiating out of us and it’s being wasted.”
After a few prototypes, she
unveiled her “hollow flashlight,” so named because it has a hollow
aluminum tube at its core that cools the sides of the peltier tiles
attached to the flashlight’s cylinder. The other side is warmed by heat
from a hand gripping the flashlight.
Art Makosinski remembers his surprise when Ann figured out how to light the flashlight’s LEDs at 20 millivolts: “I didn’t believe it, I had to inspect the circuit. I said what did you do here, do you have a hidden battery on the other side?”
At the behest of Kate Paine, her
ninth grade marine biology teacher at St. Michaels University School,
Ann submitted her flashlight into the 2013 Google Science Fair last
spring. She promptly forget all about it. Thousands of kids apply from
around the world. She said she didn’t think she had a chance.
A few months later, in September
2013, Ann was named a finalist in her age group. She travelled to
Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to present alongside
equally impressive projects, like a cure for the common cold and a
robotic exoskeleton. “I didn’t expect to win anything,” she said.
Her prize was a trophy made out of Legos, a visit to the Lego Group headquarters in Denmark, and a $25,000 scholarship.
“I still have some of the same confetti that rained down,” said Ann. “Just an amazing experience and probably something I won’t experience ever again.”
When Ann returned to Victoria,
she received a standing ovation at her high school’s Monday morning
assembly. In the months since, she has given three TEDx talks and
appeared on the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”
And then there’s the business of
securing her flashlight’s patent and tweaking the prototype for market.
At roughly 24 lumens, Ann’s flashlight’s brightness falls shy of
commercial flashlights, which output dozens if not hundreds of lumens.
Of her efforts to increase her
flashlight’s voltage efficiency, she said, “I want to make sure my
flashlight is available to those who really need it.”
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/this-could-be-big-abc-news/teen-invents-flashlight-could-change-world-182121097.html?vp=1
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