Slashdot Mirror
On Afghanistan's Thomas Edison
13.7BillionYears writes "The Institute for War and Peace Reporting details on the exploits of Ghulam Sediq Wardak, a 62 year old semi-literate Afghan with 341 clever inventions to his credit. His first was a radio powered by the low voltage produced by the human body. His most recent is a 1980 Volkswagen rigged to run on solar power. A handful of others are mentioned. Like many a Slashdotter, his parents were once very worried and he eschews patents. 'The main purpose of my inventing is not to earn money,' he says. 'I want to render a service to my countrymen and to all people in the world.'"
Hmmm ... it seems to me that use of the human body as a power grid is immediately extensible to the use of it as any other type of grid upon which electron flow is contingent *cough* MS PAN Patent *cough*.
I happen to share his views that some things should be done For The Good of Mankind and should be Free, but with this aside (or maybe because of this), were I in his shoes, I'd strive for a few things:
1) Contact EFF for legal funding of Me v. Microsoft.
2) If/When MS's patent is overturned, then turn the patent over to Public Domain.
3) Don't profit! Just know that I righted a wrong and successfully defended Prior Art to boot!
many of his inventions seem to be cheaper versions of what we know to exist.
So I thought of a heater, which would turn off automatically when the water was boiled and when the water gets cold, it would turn on again. And then I made it
basically an alternative to a thermostat, but effective and cheaper.
His system involved surrounding a house with concealed wires that were attached to a battery, an audio cassette player and a camera. When the intruder stepped on the wire, it triggered the cassette player, which played a tape shouting, "There's a thief!". It also activated the camera, which would take a picture of the burglar.
again, simplified version of the modern alarm system.
i find his original ideas more interesting, the crying-baby-activated rocking cradle (does this already exist?), solar-powered well-lift, etc.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
By the way, it's "jury rig," not "jerry rig." The phrase comes from the nautical term "jury mast," which is a temporary mast erected in place of a damaged one.
-Mike
Try Tesla. Edison was stuck on the DC plan, which doesn't transmit over distance very well. And yes, Edison was a patent madman, any way you look at it. Not a bad comparo however, since Edison was really more of an 'embrace and extend' guy (he took credit for the entire output of his shop) and our middle eastern inventor seems more about practical good service to humanity. (but wait until someone starts waving money at him for an invention!)
Edison wanted DC generators. Telsa invented AC generators. Edison's power grid wasn't good for more than a few blocks at the most.
Despite my admitted nitpick, I also smell exaggeration.
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
Seeing as the previous respondant got modded down for some reason i shall pose the same question? Since when is Afghanistan Arab?
Afghanistan is closer to Pakistan in tribal links , culture and ancestory(sp?).
But at 17, he produced his first invention: a radio that operated without batteries. It was made out of a matchbox, wires, and headphones, and was powered by the low voltage electricity produced by a person's body.
Thats insane! He's more Mcguyver then the Wizard of Menlo Park!
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
If slashdot start to give an annual "honorific life membership" he should be one of the first to get the title. Kudos to the guy! :)
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
I don't suppose there are any /.'ers out there in or near Afghanistan. Are there?
If there were, it would be really cool to contact Ghulam and see if he would be interested in publishing his inventions on the web. There are a lot of third world countries out there who could use them.
So anyone out there up for Project Wardak?
Cheers
Yes, definitively, we need more people like him.
I think that this guy has not only excelent skills, he has excellent "simple" ideas. This kind of "simple" ideas which nobody thaughts about. That's the essence of an inventor
I liked this part:Could anybody tell me *why* we don't have "don't touch anything" bathrooms?. I know, there are optical sensors for the tap and a few more things, but I've never seen a public bathroom (i.e. restaurant, job, etc.) designed to be used without touching things. It's not so dificult, so... why not?
Or I'm being excesively maniac? ;-)
Or just call any IP-benevolent inventor a "Wardak" ...
I suppose that would depend on whose idea of intellectual property rights you are talking about. I think I know where the lions share of dotters stand.
A little disturbing that a google on the term will put WIPO right there at the top so you can't miss it!
Interesting, I couldn't get to the WIPO page by clicking that link. Maybe a piering issue on my end or perhaps they've been DDoSed. Not that I would eeeeeevvver suggest that doing so would be a fantabulous idea!
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
After poking around a bit, it seems that "jerry-rig" is a variation of "jury-rig" with the subtle difference that the former is slapdash and haphazard while the latter is temporary. The former looks like a better fit in regards to the article.
Quote from http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfra nklin_inventions.htm
Ah, and someone quoted Franklin on the issue in a slashdot article before:m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/18/1339201.sht
a paypal account for this guy or something? He should be well-funded. He certainly seems to have proven the old fable that "nessesity is the mother of invention".
it's not ripping him off if he wants the ideas to be implemented.. if he just displays the ideas in use and doesn't patent them then they're effectively 'free' ideas forever.
besides than that, it would probably cost him more than what it would be worth(the guy is living on 200$ per month, which might get a living in afghanistan but sure as heck doesn't make a lot of budget for applying for patents).
so, tell me, what difference would there be in him patenting the stuff he does and then licensing them for free(which is what he would want to do) and not patenting at all? and how the hell is the money lining up in someone elses pockets, you think they wouldn't forward the licensing costs to the buyers of the manufactured stuff if they had to pay for the licenses? the solar powered water pump business just doesn't work that way, if he had a patent and could demand say 30$ per pump then the price of the pump would be 30$ higher, this is something that the guy doesn't want.
so in short, he wants others to 'rip him off', he just calls it helping his fellow men.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I saw an interesting variation on this while viewing the Canada Day ceremonies in Charlottetown this year... Near the huge line of portable toilets(with similary long lines of people... it was an interesting 2 dimensional array...) there were a group of 4 sided wash stations that pumped water when you stepped on a small foot pump in the base and dispensing soapy water. The paper towel holder and disposal bin were also built in... I'd not seen those before, but they sound similar in idea.
(Of course, I just wandered over to a local resteraunt and used the washrooms with no lineup, and therefore the classical taps to dispense water...)
Anyway, just thought you should know!
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
Seems like a cool guy, but I'm still waiting for the second coming of Tesla. The man had a CAD program in his head, truly a genius, and yet the last I looked for a biography I could find only one. Very sad.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I commend this fellow. His abilities and his persistence are inspirational. Whether or not he has patented or something has been done before, he deserves praise for his inventiveness and willingness to work on and share ideas that are new to him.
Like many a Slashdotter, his parents were once very worried and he eschews patents
We were very worried? But we didn't even know about him before the article...
Actually, I know I've seen other articles about Afghani ingenuity in "tinkering"... they've been making due for a long time with very little, so an inventive mind (especially with machines) is very useful. If something breaks, and there's no way you're going to be able to get a new one, you try to fix it. Seems like this guy really had a talent for it.
My grandfather loved tinkering as well, partly related to memories of tough times during the Great Depression (he owned an electric supplies company and had money later... but the guy still never threw ANYTHING out).
Some neat inventions: a device that would automatically close the windows when it rained, an automatic garage door opener (using a plate in the driveway), and a little train that carried concrete and such things (and children, later) around the property on sections of wooden track. His last project was a model train set he was building from scratch, with working signals and so on.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Probably the second most dirty thing on the inside of a public bathroom after the knobs for the sink is the door handle to the exit of the bathroom.
Well, some phrases did sound a bit fishy to me, and I thought that my fellow /.er would ask for a bit more of a proof or at least confirmation of the fact, rather than getting into the usual "patents-vs.-public good" discussion.
;-/
;-) ), except that to maybe make other not-too-literate people feel good about themselves. (yes, that was the part that made me a bit suspicious)
I grew up in Soviet Russia (yeah, for real this time!) and we did have our share of "backyard inventors" kicking socks off the capitialist pigs in semi-techical news strories (yes, it was just state-run propaganda, of course, though some ideas were not too bad). And, BTW, does the name of Lysenko mean anything to this crowd?
If the story is true, it is really remarkable, though I am not really sure how the fact of him being "semi-literate" really fits into the story (we have all been semi-literate at some stages of our life, and a guy like him would have learned the "tough skill" by now
Paul B.
Actually, it's from the French navy - "Rig du Jour", or rigged for the day. It implies a temporary repair on the rigging.
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
he cant get patents.
As has been pointed out before, most (if not all) of his ideas have prior art and have been already patented in different forms before....
technically speaking,this is merely derivative even though he probably has never heard of them before
Sometimes they can't if the idea is patented. The inventor may say yes, but the corporation he sold his rights to would (for the most part) say no. At least that's the way it is in the modern world. So if you can invent, chances are you already devoted your personal resources to the company you work for...save for a few personal projects they wouldn't know about.
Life is not for the lazy.
That's lovely, Cliff, but there's no word "rig" in French.
Sunlight (total energy available) at sea-level is about 1100Watts/m^2. He's in Afghanistan, so it's higher up. Maybe he can get 1500Watts/m^2 on a good day. That's pretty good. With say 5o% efficent solar panels, that's about a horsepower, consistantly straight from solar. It only takes about 11-15HP to push a Bug down the highway at 60MPH. I bet it could do 15MPH on just one horsepower.
With some modest solar panels a fairly heavy car such as a VW could easily be run in a start-stop (charge-discharge cycles) sort of way quite easily, and with a large enough bank of batteries, you might even go a fair distance, and have some good accelerating power.
Sure, it's not going to set a speed record for crossing the US, but it might very well work in Afghanistan for short jaunts.
In the South and in some other places, they call it Nigger-rigged. It's a reflection of the old idea that black people never have more tools than a hammer and a screwdriver, much less the technical knowledge to cobble together a good long term solution. Hence, if your car stalls on the highway, your best hope is to nigger-rig it and pray that it gets you home.
Nautical lingo often contains vocabulary from a mix of many languages, because for a long time it was the one vocation where people of mixed languages got thrown together in one job, and the one vocation where someone might actually travel to more than a few different countries in a lifetime, and be exposed to a variety of languages.
So using the french "du jour" with the english "rig" is perfectly plausable. Nautical lingo is almost its own seperate language anyway (When have you ever heard "rig" used in english to mean "collection of nets and ropes that hold a structure in place", in some context OTHER than sailing?)
I don't know if the poster is right or not about the origin of the word, but the fact that it contains a mix of french and english, by itself, is not the problem you make it out to be.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I've "patronised" public toilets in Germany that have little IR beam/sensor things in them near the top. They detect when you move away from them and automatically flush.
The same place had washbasins with taps that switched on when you held your hands underneath them. The hot air hand driers worked in the same way.
Automatic doors would have made it al perfect but they seemed to have neglected that.
xGSV Consolation of Dreams
Yes, I would say parallels could definatly be drawn.
;)
Bill gates is a very ruthless business man, like edison. Bill gates himself is worse than edison because he dindt actually create anything. He purchased DOS, used other's ideas for windows, and leveraged his advantage to become a monopoly.
I dont know if edison would have done the same, but he did create the foundation of a very large company (General Electric).
But, at least edison did work on some stuff, and you can say the stuff that came out of menlo park WAS usefull and bettered mankind, even if essentially none of it is in use today. The things invented at menlo park were a gateway to bigger and better things.
It just irks me sometimes that edison gets so much recognition, and tesla gets so little. Go to the smithsonian and try to find references to tesla, good luck.
Find the area about electricity, it will show the niagra falls power plant, and the caption reads something like 'and here is the first powerplant, which was startd in the magic of menlo park' or something along those lines.. This all but credits edison for it, when he had nothing to do with it whatsoever. He tryed to push an inferior standard. He would have succeeded had tesla not had some more schrewd backers, and perhaps if his idea wasnt totally unworkable. He could even have kept tesla in menlo park, and claimed credit for his idea as he did so many others, it was very close.
Tesla had a lot of crazy ideas at the end of his lifetime, and while they just sound nuts, his former genious would lead me to lend an ear, or help him out if it were in my power.
Either way, getting off topic here, but I would say edison is definatly not a person to be idolized, but he is probably a bit better than bill gates
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
edison was the bill gates of his time.
to spread FUD about AC electricity, he went around
electrocuting dogs to scare people away from using AC.
During the 1880s, electric service was just beginning to be sold to
towns and cities. Thomas Edison and his companies used direct current (DC).
George Westinghouse and his companies used alternating current (AC).
Both Edison and Westinghouse tried to convince potential customers of
the superiority of their systems. Edison and his staff used an AC generator
to electrocute dozens of dogs, cats, even cows and horses in an attempt to
demonstrate that Westinghouse's equipment was dangerous. Edison's lobbying
was successful and the Medico-Legal Society, charged by NY Department of
Prisons with designing the Electric Chair...
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
(Thomas Alva Edison)
If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once
with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found
the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings,
knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him
ninety per cent of his labour.
(Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931)