The problem
Famine had ended his schooling, the family farm depended on rain, and the village had no electricity.
The innovation
A wind turbine assembled from a bicycle frame and dynamo, a tractor cooling fan, PVC pipe blades and blue-gum poles, driven by a library physics textbook he could only partly read in English.
How it worked
The bicycle dynamo generated current from the rotor; later versions were scaled up to pump water for irrigation and to charge batteries for lighting and radios.
Why it mattered
Light in the house, phone charging in the village, and a second growing season from irrigation.
The legacy
Widely used as evidence of what happens when technical literacy reaches places that development programmes reach late — and of the value of a small rural library.
Sources
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
ScholarshipTED Fellows record and contemporaneous reporting
Institutional record
Follow the invention
The Ishango Bone
A baboon fibula marked with three organised columns of tally notches, excavated by Jean de Heinzelin at Ishango on Lake Edward.
The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu
Hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscripts, including works on astronomy and medicine, held in family and institutional libraries.
Illusion transmitter
A pair of concave mirrors that produce a real optical image appearing to occupy space in front of the display, transmissible to a remote location.