Only 2% of Malawi had electricity in 2002, and a 14-year-old sent home from school over $80 in fees built a 5-metre tower from blue gum poles, a broken bicycle and a tractor fan — the dynamo lit four bulbs and two radios, and the village that laughed at it queued to charge phones 27AUG26

 

THIS is one of those good news stories that are not publicized often enough so I am happy to share this here. There are links to more stories, good and bad news, from Science Blog at the end of this post.....

Only 2% of Malawi had electricity in 2002, and a 14-year-old sent home from school over $80 in fees built a 5-metre tower from blue gum poles, a broken bicycle and a tractor fan — the dynamo lit four bulbs and two radios, and the village that laughed at it queued to charge phones

A teenager expelled for unpaid fees scavenged scrap metal and bicycle parts to build a windmill that transformed his village—and proved that ingenuity thrives where resources don't.

By Brendan Brown

Published August 27, 2026 · How we edit

The famine came first. In 2001 the rains failed across Malawi, the maize crop collapsed, and by the following year families in the farming village of Wimbe were living on one meal a day, then less. Among them were the Kamkwambas, tobacco farmers with seven children, and when the school year came due, the roughly $80 in fees for their only son, William, was money that did not exist.

So at 14, William Kamkwamba was sent home from secondary school after a few weeks. In a country where, at the time, only about 2 percent of the population had electricity, and rather less than that in rural districts like his, a farm boy without schooling had a predictable future, and it ran on kerosene, sunlight and hand labor.

What saved him was a small village library stocked by an aid program, and one book in it.

The book with the windmills

Unable to attend classes, William kept sneaking an education, borrowing books from the library near his old primary school. Most were in English, which he barely read, so he studied the diagrams. One battered American textbook, called Using Energy, had photographs of wind turbines on its cover, towers with spinning blades, and the text explained that they could pump water and generate electricity.

For a hungry farm family, that sentence was not abstract. Electric light meant studying after dark. A pump meant a second maize crop in the dry season, and an end to hunger as an annual gamble. William later put the calculation with brutal simplicity: with a windmill, they could finally be released from the misery of the dark, and of hunger. Malawi had plenty of wind. The book said the machine was possible. He decided to build one from whatever the village could supply.

Junkyard physics

The supply list read like a scavenger hunt through rural poverty. From a scrapyard across from his old school he pulled a broken bicycle with one wheel, a rusted tractor cooling fan, and an old shock absorber. He melted plastic pipes over a fire and flattened them into blades to extend the fan’s reach, drilling holes with a nail heated in the coals. His father’s maize-mill machinery gave up a ball bearing; bottle caps became washers; and after months of saving and help from a friend, he got the crucial component, a bicycle dynamo, the little bottle-shaped generator that rubs against a wheel to power a headlamp.

The design logic was pure improvisation on a sound principle. Wind turns the blades, the blades turn the bicycle wheel, the wheel’s chain-and-sprocket gearing spins the dynamo fast enough to make useful current. With his cousin and his friend he raised a tower of blue gum tree poles, about five metres tall, lashed and nailed together, and hauled the machine to the top.

The village had watched all this with open scorn. Neighbors, and at times his own mother, thought the boy dragging scrap through town had lost his mind; the word that followed him around Wimbe was misala, crazy. A crowd of a few dozen gathered under the tower for what most expected to be a public failure.

William connected the wires to a small bulb. The wind picked up, the blades spun, and the bulb flickered, then burned steadily in his hand.

The queue at the crazy boy’s house

The machine worked, and then it kept working. Wired into the family house, the windmill ran four light bulbs and two radios, and William added a car battery to store power for calm days, plus homemade light switches and a circuit breaker built from nails, magnet wire and melted rubber. The family that could not afford school fees now had the only electric light for miles.

The laughter converted instantly into a queue. Neighbors who had called him crazy began lining up at the house to charge mobile phones, which were spreading through rural Malawi years ahead of the grid. William, characteristically, responded to demand by upgrading: taller towers, better blades, more machines, including a windmill dedicated to pumping water for irrigation, the original dream that had started with a hungry season.

From Wimbe to everywhere

For five years the windmill was purely local legend. Then in late 2006 a Malawian newspaper wrote up the boy engineer of Wimbe, a blogger spotted the story, and the internet did the rest. William was invited to the TED conference in Tanzania in 2007, where he told the story in halting English to a standing ovation, and the education that $80 had interrupted resumed on a global scale: the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, then Dartmouth College in the United States, class of 2014.

His memoir, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, became a bestseller and, in 2019, a Netflix film directed by and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor. William has spent the years since on exactly the problem he started with, working on projects that teach young Africans to build their own solutions with what’s at hand.

The original windmill’s arithmetic remains the sharpest part of the story. The gap between a bright teenager and an engineer turned out to be one library book and a scrapyard. What the fee system priced at $80, the wind delivered for free, and the village that laughed queued up to plug in.

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1On 18 August 1868, French astronomer Pierre Janssen pointed a spectroscope at a total solar eclipse over Guntur, India, and saw a bright yellow line that matched no element known on Earth — helium would not be found in a laboratory here for another 27 years.The Artful Age2In 2015, ZeroFox flagged peaceful Black Lives Matter organisers as threat actors in Baltimore. In July, ICE gave the same company $15 million to monitor doxing threatsDirect Message News3One of ageing research’s most counterintuitive findings is that biological-age markers may not move steadily in one direction. They can rise within days under the stress of surgery, pregnancy or severe illness, then fall again during recovery—suggesting that at least part of what we measure as ageing is a fluid physiological state, not simply damage accumulating year after year.

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Romney and Obama Give Dueling Speeches While Romney Campaign Behave Like Idiots 15JUN12

mitt romney condemns Pres Obama on the economy in Ohio, a state which, during the Obama administration, has seen it's unemployment rate drop from over 10% to just over 7%, below the national average. DUH! All romney was able to prove is that his campaign managers are incompetent (why wasn't he in a state with higher than the national average unemployment?) and that he can only criticize the President, he offered no real, concrete proposals to fix the economy. His campaign is as hollow as his head. From Crooks & Liars....

By karoli

This morning as networks were setting their schedules to accomodate the President's economic policy speech in Cleveland, the Romney campaign decided they needed to try and upstage that by having their boy give one in Cincinnati at the very same time. How mature of them. As Martin Bashir notes, we're surprised they didn't put on some fake police uniforms and pull over the President's motorcade.
After other Romney campaign operatives demonstrated how utterly stupid and childish they were by driving their campaign bus around the venue for President Obama's speech, things got real. Let me just cut to the chase. Here's the President's vision for the economy: Education. Energy. Innovation. Infrastructure. Here's Mitt Romney's:

"You may have heard that President Obama is on the other side of the state and he’s going to be delivering a speech on the economy. He’s doing that because he hasn’t delivered a recovery for the economy," Romney said. "And he’s going to be a person of eloquence as he describes his plans for making the economy better. But don’t forget, he’s been president for three and a half years. And talk is cheap. Action speaks very loud. And if you want to see the results of his economic policies, look around Ohio, look around the country, you’ll see a lot of people are hurting."

Yes, well the thing is, a lot less people are hurting than were in 2008. Here are the 2008 numbers, taken from the text of the President's speech:

For the wealthiest Americans, it worked out pretty well. Over the last few decades, the income of the top 1 percent grew by more than 275 percent -- to an average of $1.3 million a year. Big financial institutions, corporations saw their profits soar. But prosperity never trickled down to the middle class.
From 2001 to 2008, we had the slowest job growth in half a century. The typical family saw their incomes fall. The failure to pay for the tax cuts and the wars took us from record surpluses under President Bill Clinton to record deficits. And it left us unprepared to deal with the retirement of an aging population that’s placing a greater strain on programs like Medicare and Social Security.
Without strong enough regulations, families were enticed, and sometimes tricked, into buying homes they couldn’t afford. Banks and investors were allowed to package and sell risky mortgages. Huge, reckless bets were made with other people’s money on the line. And too many from Wall Street to Washington simply looked the other way.
For a while, credit cards and home equity loans papered over the reality of this new economy -- people borrowed money to keep up. But the growth that took place during this time period turned out to be a house of cards. And in the fall of 2008, it all came tumbling down -- with a financial crisis that plunged the world into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Here in America, families’ wealth declined at a rate nearly seven times faster than when the market crashed in 1929. Millions of homes were foreclosed. Our deficit soared. And nine million of our citizens lost their jobs -- 9 million hardworking Americans who had met their responsibilities, but were forced to pay for the irresponsibility of others.

Now given those constraints, and also given that the economy has not recovered completely but is in danger of stalling due to the current Republican-made stalemate in Congress, it's fair to say that we are not where we were in 2008. I remember far worse days than today. It is possible to point to progress, after all, without claiming "mission accomplished." Better than 2008, but a long way to go, as Martin Bashir explains.
Bashir gives the numbers on the Ohio economy, which is performing better than the national economy. The unemployment rate in Ohio is down sharply from 2009's high of over 10 percent, for example. In Ohio, things are much better today than they were in 2008, and there's absolutely no reason to expect that Romney's policies would maintain or improve their lot.
President Obama clearly outlined the choices between Romney and himself as far as economic vision goes. Romney wants austerity; Obama wants shared prosperity. Romney wants a top-down economy; Obama wants a middle-out economy. That term is a little bit tortured, but essentially Obama is arguing that demand will drive economic recovery, whereas austerity will kill demand further, placing more strain on a fragile recovery.
What I took away from the speech was that there's a stark choice to be made about the economy, as David Corn says. It's a choice between returning to Bush policies or pushing ahead with the Obama economic policies. I offer that with one criticism: There was too much emphasis on the debt and deficit. While I realize that the national debt and deficit are major concerns to many voters out there, it would have been better for him to explain why the investments need to be made now, with the tax changes coming later. This is what he did back in September when he introduced the American Jobs Act which the GOP killed in a matter of hours.
As much as I liked the speech, I also wanted to hear him draw the comparison between the old Bush-style economic policies and Mitt Romney's Bain Capital days. After all, Romney left companies in smoldering, bankrupt hulks, much like George Bush's policies left this country back in 2008. It's a fair comparison, as is a comparison to Massachusetts' economic woes when Romney left office after incorporating his policies.
Some critics of the speech (Jonathan Alter most notably) were disappointed that it didn't have "more memorable lines." I figure you can either pay lip service to the problem or actually try and explain that problem cogently. Economic policy just doesn't lend itself to catchy lines. "Yes we CAN tax the rich" rings a little bit hollow when we've got Congressional wingnuts up there on Capitol Hill voting a zillion times for anti-abortion bills and the like while completely ignoring the economic realities of their stall game on the Hill.
Are we really going to expect that a major policy speech should have catchy lines now? Ok, well, just for Alter, I offer a couple of catchy lines. I imagine a jingle contest could be launched to set them to music. Here are a couple:

Education. Energy. Innovation. Infrastructure.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Also, this one:

...through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.

And this:

And the only thing that can break the stalemate is you.

There was no comparison between the two speeches. Mitt Romney is extraordinarily bereft of any new ideas, he's got an entire staff comprised of Bushies, and a whole bunch of College Republican idiots driving around Obama rallies in buses, wasting gas and dropping noise pollution into a crazy-noisy world.
There's also no comparison between the visions. Whether you think the president should go even farther with his ideas or not, the choice on the other side is not even an option.
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/romney-and-obama-give-dueling-speeches-whil

Prize Platform Invites Citizens to Solve Nation’s Challenges 7SEP10

FOR all you smart, creative people out there, you just might have a plan, an idea that would be good for you and the nation....so check it out!
 
In search of novel solutions to the tricky problem of how to keep astronauts fit during prolonged periods of weightlessness, NASA found an unlikely ally in Alex Altshuler.  Altshuler works for a mechanical engineering firm in Foxboro, MA. He had never before responded to a formal government Request for Proposal (RFP), let alone worked with NASA.  Yet, the exercise device he designed in response to a NASA challenge constituted a major breakthrough in mitigating the loss of bone and muscle density in astronauts.  NASA dubbed the results “outstanding.”
Citizen solvers like Altshuler are at the heart of the Obama Administration’s commitment (pdf) to increase the use of prizes and challenges to solve tough problems.  Prizes allow the government to articulate bold goals – such as building a super-fuel-efficient car, developing a low-cost launch technology for small satellites, or solving the risks to human health that come with space flight – without having to predict which team or approach is most likely to succeed.  With a strict focus on results, prizes empower new, untapped talent – like Altshuler – to deliver novel solutions that accelerate innovation.
As of today, it is easier than ever for Federal agencies to mobilize American ingenuity to solve our Nation’s most pressing problems.  In a joint keynote presentation at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra unveiled (pdf) Challenge.gov, a one-stop-shop where entrepreneurs, innovators, and citizen solvers can compete for prestige and prizes by providing novel solutions to tough problems, large and small.
Challenge.gov features (pdf) over 35 challenges posed by more than 15 government agencies.  They range from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Game Day Challenge for the university that best reduces and recycles waste at college football games to a $15 million Department of Energy prize for the lighting manufacturer that meets stringent requirements for the next generation of high-quality, high-efficiency light bulbs.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack used the platform today to announce a new challenge: USDA’s Recipes for Healthy Kids Challenge—part of the First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Initiative—which invites school nutrition professionals, chefs, students, and parents to develop nutritious, kid-approved foods for school menus. “The Recipes for Healthy Kids Challenge is an important contribution to our overall efforts to combat childhood obesity,” the First Lady said in a statement.  “It’s vital that we provide our children with healthy and nutritious food in school and help them learn healthy eating habits that will last a lifetime.”
These challenges are just a handful of those featured on Challenge.gov and just a taste of what’s to come.  By making it simple and free to post challenges, Challenge.gov will accelerate agency adoption of prizes as a means of spurring innovation.
To share your novel solutions, compete for prizes and prestige, and advance our national priorities, visit www.challenge.gov.