How I Learned to Charge My Cell Phone With My Hands

Maybe you’re like me and you’ve realized that there’s a price to pay for the way we live in “the civilized world.”

Charging a mobile device is pretty simple. Insert an adapter into the device which connects a flow of electricity from an outlet to the device. As long as the electricity hasn’t been shut off, the device should charge. That is if there is nothing wrong with the device, the charging mechanism, or the wall outlet.

But what about emergency situations, like a bad winter storm or financial hardship, when there is no electricity flowing?

While I was watching a few documentaries, I learned about a hard choice that some families have to make in the winter. Do they heat the house or buy food to eat?

As useful as electricity is, it’s not edible.

That got me thinking of how these families could provide their own energy. If they didn’t have to worry about heating, they could worry less about having enough money to buy food to eat. Assuming, of course, that the new, energy-providing invention didn’t drive up the cost of food…

So, I set out, looking for human-powered electricity generators.

First, I came upon Robert, a bicycle, and the toaster:

And don’t worry, there are at least 50 years of research findings that all say that’s a horrible model for generating electricity.

Somewhere in the universe, there are pyramid-builders laughing at the bicycle-power model.

The sound of their laughter got me a little sidetracked with how humans could make energy on a large scale. And, per usual, I found someone in the Netherlands working on the question. In fact, they had exactly what I was looking for — the Human Power Plant.

The only thing is that what I was really looking for was something that could go into existing homes. We have a lot of improvement to do as a society so priorities are important. It seems to me that changing infrastructure would take a lot more moving of physical material than changing minds would. Maybe I’m wrong, but I started looking for small, human-powered generators anyway.

I found a lot of cool things like turning a ceiling fan into a wind generator and powering a light with magnets, but I wasn’t finding what I was looking for. To improve my search terms, I drew up a model of what I thought could work in a small apartment. The basic idea was to use a flywheel to aid a person in lifting a hefty weight for electricity to be generated as the weight slowly falls.

One day, as I was describing this brilliant idea to my friend, Karen, she told me she’d seen a TED talk about it!

After I got over the initial shock that there was a TED talk that I hadn’t seen, I found GravityLight.

Then I also found out that they’re not made anymore… What they make now is NowLight!

What I loved most about finding Deciwatt, the creator of GravityLight and NowLight, was their Facebook support. I told them how happy I was to find them working on the model I had drawn up and also about the reason why I had drawn the model up in the first place. They recognized the limitation in their current models to power heating in a home and then pointed me to NexGen Heating.

These guys use nanotechnology and electricity to heat strips of material that then heat floors or walls or ceilings. On that last one, you might be thinking “That’s useless! Hot air rises!” And you’d be right about the hot air, but where is your ceiling going to go when it’s been heated?

If it’s anything like our ceiling, it’ll be there for a long time and provide radiant heat even after the NexGen Heating has shut off.

While my search has not yet solved the problem for those families that have to choose between heating and eating in the winter, I have learned a lot. One thing that I’ve learned is how to charge my phone with my hands.

Maybe it’s not quite as magical as it sounds, but I really like the Deciwatt people! So I bought a NowLight and have made a pact with myself to only charge my phone with the energy that I’ve made with my own hands.

Why does that make any sense? Well, I’m into making outrageous goals based on what little I’ve learned. I will fail along the way, but I forgive myself and try again. Also, far too often, when there’s a price to pay but we don’t personally have to pay it, we’re too complacent to change anything.

I don’t want to be complacent anymore.

What about you?