Malawi Boy Harnessed Electric Wind in Africa

William Kamkwamba was a young teenager when his family's poverty forced him to give up formal schooling. He found some books at a tiny local library that explained the principles of electricity and physics in pictures and diagrams; because the books were in English, a language he did not speak or read, he studied the images to figure out how he might create a wind machine to generate power. From a nearby junkyard, he gathered scrap metals, an old bicycle dynamo, a tractor fan, a bicycle wheel and frame, and PVC pipe. He assembled them atop a tower from branches that he cut from blue gum trees in his village. He didn't even have tools, but fashioned his own to create his windmill. He ran a wire from his wind generator to his house to power a couple of lightbulbs. Eventually his story became news, he became famous and he became a student at Dartmouth College studying engineering. His windmill has propagated into several windmills and solar panels that provide electricty and irrigation to his small village in Malawi.