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Gravity Lamp Grabs Green Prize
eldavojohn writes "A lamp powered by gravity has won the second prize at the Greener Gadgets Conference in NYC. From the article, "The light output will be 600-800 lumens — roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb over a period of four hours. To "turn on" the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour glass-like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gentle glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp ... Moulton estimates that Gravia's mechanisms will last more than 200 years, if used eight hours a day, 365 days a year." The article contains links to the patents and the designer/inventor Clay Moulton's site." I think my laptop would require a slightly larger weight to pull this off.
Where can you buy it and how much.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
you will have to start flipping your desktop over every few minutes ;-)
How about a clock?
i'm going to use the light from this lamp to power my photovoltaic weight lifting machine.
Will it still be cool to light up your lamp with gravity, when there's no gravity left and people are spinning right off the planet into outerspace? I guess it will eliminate the greenhouse gas issue by allowing the atmosphere to disappear when there's no more gravity left - but unfortunately it will also not allow people to live (the ones that are still on the planet after the other ones spun off into space as noted earlier)
But what will we do after peak gravity?
You don't know the difference between a lamp and a clock?
One tells time, the other emits light. I thought that was fairly obvious.
Duh! Because it's a *light* powered by weights!
No sig for you!!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
My gerbils take offense to this. (No Richard Gere jokes, please)
I've already started looking into buying "gravity offsets" and trying to use as much rope, glue, velcro, and static cling as possible.
I like basketball!!1!
...think it means. The human body has only about a 20% thermal efficiency. Add to this the ecological cost of transporting goods to the human for consumption, and you'll see where I'm going with this argument: what's touted as a "green" device actually costs the planet more per hour than any other light fixture ever invented.
So this idea may be useful in 3rd world countries where power grids are not available, but anyone with access to hydroelectric, wind, solar, coal, or nuclear power will actually be doing less damage to the planet by plugging the same light bulb into a wall receptacle.
End rant.
So basically, this thing runs on pizza, pop tarts, coffee, mountain dew, and beer?
All you'd need is one that ran on heat, assuming you're not into necrophilia.
They should make one attached to your chair and powered by your own weight. Then the pop tarts and beer would make it work better.
In America, the energy doesn't come from food, it comes from fatrolls. So this not only decreases your electricity usage, it improves your car's MPG and reduces the likelihood of needing to manufacture insulin shots.
Now all we have to do is make the weights out of hypercompressed CO2 and it's a total win.
If we rigged this up to the Total Gym, Chuck Norris could power the entire country in just 20 minutes a day for low low payments of $19.95.
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If only the machines in The Matrix knew this...
I like basketball!!1!
Maybe it uses one of those energy efficient bulbs. Those cut energy use by over half.
Factor of 2 accounted or, only 500 to go...
He could've made this even greener by incorporating a small bird or monkey whose job it was to crank this to the top. This way, the people of the world are motivated to preserve wildlife so that they can read novels at night.
6x10^9W. Rotational energy of the earth 10^29J. Time to spin down ~5x10^19seconds. or about 10^11 years.
We may be safe.
I never won a green prize for that.
I guess I was ahead of my time.
All I remember was.. the brakes didn't work, and I felt pain for 2 weeks.
If you want to start that game, it is being powered by the Big Bang. ...which was powered by The Great A'tuin, when it Defecated.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
Upon further inspection, it turns out the 50 lb mass is actually 50 6-volt lantern batteries. Oops.
And that's why, in the real world, people use real measuring units. We have 22.7kg falling through 1.47m under an acceleration of 10ms-2, giving 333.69J of energy. Over 4 hours, that is 23.2 milliwatts.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You doubt the power of His Noodly Appendage?
Your story reminds me of the time when I turned an ordinary bicycle into a gravity-powered superbike. I still have a scar from that one.
Legalize it.
Exactly. That is what the "Apple" section is for.
Hey, I have one of those. Well, not quite. You have to take the bags out to a box in the back alley, but THAT never fills up.
My thought is that is was much related to the spin. I mean, if you could slowly spin a generator, you'd get power for as long as it would spin, right? I hate the friggin know it all idiots that post about how impossible it is, based on their physics 101 class in school. DUH, if your physics teacher knew how to make a revolutionary machine, he wouldn't be teaching your sorry butt.
Personally I think it is because people don't have maps and uh I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to understand thermodynamics.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Yup. But the slower it spins the less power you get out of it.
My guess is you didn't even get the Physics 101.