Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Leave it to Hong Kong

Remember my brilliant idea a few posts back?

Well, turns out it's not such a crazy idea after all. Or a new one.

Converting elbow grease into electricity has a long, odd history. The first telephones, in the 1800s, had hand cranks that generated an electrical signal to alert the operator when one wanted to make a call. Hand-crank flashlights have long been available. So have hand-crank portable radios.
And apparently it's not very efficient.

If all the exercise machines were in use 10 hours a day for a year, the gym could generate roughly $183 worth of electricity. At that rate, it would take about 82 years to pay off [a] $15,000 investment.
Read the article here.

But I say, if we're doing it anyway, we might as well use what we can, right? Who's with me?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought about your post during the Super Bowl. They had stationary bikes that powered like 30 minutes of the broadcast. Pretty nifty!

Cheers.

Tim Glenn said...

So what you're saying is...if you had been around 100 years ago, you would've been considered a genius!

Christer said...

I know we weer going to go in on this whole human power-plant thingy together, but ...

Nevermind. I'm out. I had no idea it'd be so much work for such a little payoff. Forget it.

mandy said...

now that is utterly disappointing....
sad