Here is Max Loughan – a 13 year old who made an energy harvester to take radio waves and other energies from the air and turned it into electricity to power LEDs.
It is similar to crystal radio technology and harvesters are not new, but seeing that a very bright 13 year old is passionate about invention and what it could do for the world is worthy of praise!
We need to encourage more children to move in this direction. Awesome job Max and thumbs up to your Tesla T-shirt too!
Well I hope he won’t drop out of school, where he can learn 2+2=5 and reach is full potential in a 9 to 5 job where we are all meant to be by the powers that be !
But for real I hope his dad is wise enuf to help his kid patent his invention so that they can be financially secured and be free of the system…
But will the patent office except such a device? They are tied to the big Oil and Power companies and won’t allow this type of energy to go any farther. Sad greedy people!
patents are way over rated anyways who needs them? Certainly after years of inventing Thomas Edison himself stop applying for patents as he figured out that was where his competitors were getting information leaked before he was awarded Letters patent which was not only illegal for the patent office to do at that time but also undermined many of his inventions as his competitors were selling them or similar devices before he could tool up to mass produce it. And all a patent does is give one a right to sue those infringing upon your inventions…but only for a season but does nothing to stop them from doing so such as is the case with copyright violations…FBI steps in to shut them down by locking down everything and confiscating all materials, tooling, money or any other connection in the infridgement for six months or more while they do the investigation and then the perp is charged whatever is imagined in the judges mind the damages done and you will pay it or have everything you earned garnished until satisfied. So would say copyrights are much stronger properties to own then patents which to me are weak and maybe even detrimental to the inventors best interest as they open up so many ways to be screwed out of it.
Excellent.. The controlling forces are starting to be out numbered.. If Max ever visits Australia he can come to my house and i’ll show him my work with inductors and motors 🙂 It is soo true that you can generate a much stronger magnetic field for work then the required DC current running through that coil… I measure over 200% magnetic field strength (and thermal energy apparently) then a coil driven from a DC only (non pulsed) source. Simply pulse the coil and collect back emf,,. as power is returned, the forward current in the coil is still present.. When I realized this the biggest smile was on my face for weeks… 🙂 Been working on a modification to my generator that dropped an intake valve and smashed it back up into the head… nothing else to do with it now but play with this knowledge 🙂 fast switching is the key.. and the hurdle…
I have said for years this exact thing was possible even tho I had never tried to do it other than build crystal radios at around age 7. But it occured to me studying electronics that many things in electronics work (in what I call) forward and backwards for instance a microphone of certain types will work as a headphone if held upto you ear while its pluged into an audio output jack on your computer’s back panel sound card jacks and also some headphones can be used as a mic plugged into the mic in jack. I believe many electronic devices can do similar things. Think about how similar a TV’s screen is to a digital camera’s chip for capturing images..one delievers an image and the other captures it yet they both use tiny dots or pixels in the construction of the componants the camera chip being sort of a miniture version of a TV tube …somewhat anyway…could it be the common TV could have been used to watch us in the privacy of our own homes unawares? For me, I think it was not only possible but think it has always been used just for that purpose…Your TV doing double duty, but some might dismise the notion as just paranoia or a conspiracy theory. No, like I said many electronic componants can work both ways, its not a theory I have proved it with many devices. Speakers can deliver sound by expending electrical watts of power through them or they can collect sound and produce electrical current like a solar panel collects light, again not a theory have been there done it and may market sound collecting devices to do just that, harvest sound as an electric generation device. Might work well in invironments that are continually extreemely noisy to charge baterries to do other work in that same location being harvested.
Max was adamant that he only wanted to “help the world” and was not seeking to profit. From his description the device was too simple to patent anyway. But despite all those things he never published the schematic, parts list, measurements and specifications. Instead he just quietly slinked away when technical people wanted technical details. How many times have we seen and heard this before?
Sure, energy harvesting works… and I have no doubt that efficiency will improve with the creation of new materials. But I would not live under a cell tower or something just so I can show off a string of LED’s powered by ambient radiation! The world wants and needs another Tesla to solve the world’s energy problems so badly, even the overly-skeptical mainstream news media fell for the “boy genius” hype. When it came down to ‘put up or shut up’ though, Max chose the latter for obvious reasons: he did not have all that he thought he had in this “invention.”