Free us from grid and bring power to the people
IF I HAD spare money to invest, which I obviously don’t (hey, I’m a journalist), I would buy shares in companies developing new kinds of batteries. I think there are quite a number of them and I believe the future of the human race will change dramatically when somebody comes up with a practical battery powerful enough to cope with today’s demands. Electricity is undoubtedly the power of the future. Already an aircraft is circling the globe using solar electric power.
Almost all the big car manufacturers are working on electric vehicles.
We surround ourselves with so-called “mobile” devices – smartphones, iPads and iPods and MP3s and the like – but they’re not nearly as mobile as we like to believe.
In fact, we seems to have tethered ourselves more tightly to the national electricity grid than ever before.
One of the first questions we ask when arriving at a new destination is: “Where can I charge my phone?” or “Where can I plug in my laptop?”
The more sophisticated our portable devices become the more they need to be charged at regular intervals
The present range of electric cars and scooters are fun and economical to drive, but they all have a range that’s dependent on the next plug point.
I know there are solar-powered vehicles around, but they rely on more solar panels than the entire surface area of a petrol-fuelled car. So far they’re not of practical use.
There are several “hybrid” cars on the market already, but as far as I can see, this only complicates matters.
Now you have a petrol motor used to charge batteries to drive an electric motor – two whole systems, each with the potential of going wrong.
Although I am a technical dinosaur and don’t even pretend to know about all this technology, I believe we are about to see some spectacular changes.
The human brain is a marvellous thing and sooner or later somebody will have an Eureka! moment and discover a way to store great amounts of electrical power in a light and portable form for much longer than anything available at present.
I would love to be able to say I had invested a couple of million dollars in that bright future, but as I mentioned at the beginning of the column, I am a journalist and I consider investing in a new pair of shoes about as far as I can go financially.
Maybe I should have gone into politics. That’s seems to be where the big money is.
Last Laugh
A fire engineer, who could not speak Arabic, was finding it difficult to market his newly invented fire extinguisher in the Middle East.
He consulted a marketing expert who advised him to use photographic symbols.
He produced a pamphlet showing three demonstration photographs.
The first showed a new car on fire, the second showed a man fighting the fire with the device, then the third picture showed a clean car. Nobody bought the device. The engineer consulted a local journalist who came up with the answer to the problem: Arabs read from right to the left.