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.

Comments

Re:Looks cool...

[TheLostSamurai]

"Concept illustrations of Gravia" "Moulton estimates" "He predicted" As far as I can tell this is nothing more than vaporware. There doesn't seem to be any indication in the article that this thing has actually been built. While is does seem like a cool concept the overall implementation does not seem that complicated; so why has he not actually built the thing?