The Solar CITIES Culhane Tab Torch being taught through PORPOISE ROBOTICS
Channel: Thomas H. Culhane
Date: 2012-04-25

In South L.A. where I am helping create a robotics engineering program called "Porpoise Robotics" with Motion Picture Marine (a Hollywood Technology company that makes robotic camera stabilization hardware for feature films and wildlife documentaries like Discovery Channel's "Shark Jump" Week) , I demonstrated to the students my own invention -- the "Tab Torch" -- a flashlight that runs off of discarded aluminum cans (particularly the tab from the can, which is easy to carry around like so much loose change).  I invented this after returning from a National Geographic expedition to the village of Dingboche in Nepal (near Mt. Everest Base Camp) after noting the amount of waste aluminum cans piled up in garbage heaps by the nature trails.  Since my job on the expedition last year (as this year) is to figure our sources of renewable energy to help protect the endangered juniper shrub, and we were in locations with little or no electricity, I figured out how to power a small flashlight using the aluminum tabs that I could find everywhere littered on the ground. Here I demonstrate the principles to our students at Washington Preparatory High School so that we can spread the benefits of science around the world and hopefully empower people to take their own future into their own hands, confident in the knowledge that we can erase poverty and deprivation through applied knowledge and a recycling of society's deadweight losses.