Be It Ever So Humble: Home Is The Heart of Invention
This story is part of a series from GE that explores Unexpected Inventions and the subtle geniuses who discover something new by seeing the world differently.
The comforts of home have regularly sparked great breakthroughs and inventions. It’s a tradition that goes back to legend of Archimedes stepping into his tub and observing water displacement.
Since then, inventors and scientists have used their domestic lives for inspiration and, occasionally, flipped it around to bring industry into the home.
The street light learns to speak
Sometimes invention is as simple as finding a new use for something that’s already there. Take the street light: cities are awash in them but, for years, they’ve only provided light.
A new system is putting brains into each light pole and letting them talk to operators. GE’s LightGrid wireless control means constant monitoring and control of every outdoor fixture. The system lets municipal governments and transportation departments see exactly how much electricity each light is using, learn immediately when and where outages happen and turn down lights when nobody’s on the road.
And the sensor-equipped lights could soon do much more — from environmental analysis, to alerting drivers to open parking spots and traffic management.
Skateboarding for better battery Life
For many kids, there is no better way to wind down from a stressful day at school than to pop a few ollies or complete a tasty grind on their skateboard.
One of the key ingredients to keep a killer session from turning into eating a snack of concrete is some good gritty grip tape. These add traction to the deck so the foot doesn’t slip. Some of the best grip comes courtesy of a fine coating of silicon carbide, the same tough stuff that puts the sand in sandpaper.
Scientists have found that this material also has a high-tech use. A solid chip of silicon carbide, a semiconductor like pure silicon, can be used to regulate the flow of electricity between a power source and electronics. Because of this property, the material is now being used to make power management chips that can extend battery life and reduce power consumption in jet engines, consumer electronics and medical imaging devices.
Now, recent improvements to silicon carbide chip manufacturing made by GE researchers will usher the technology into broader applications. Smarter electricity management could translate into better energy efficiency in jet and locomotive engines, and a reduction in energy use for power-hogging data centers.
The breakthrough could allow silicon carbide to compete with existing silicon chips soon. “This will be revolutionary,” says GE energy conversion engineer Ljubisa Stevanovic.
Edison, bamboo and the jet engine
Bamboo is everywhere. The member of the grass family has been employed throughout human history for domestic uses. Asian people have been eating the shoots for centuries. It is used to build and decorate homes. Strips are fashioned to make beautiful flooring. It is made into writing paper, rayon textiles and kitchen utensils. The list goes on and on, but one amazing product derived from bamboo is conspicuously modern — carbon fiber.
Thomas Edison accidentally discovered the advanced, lightweight and high-strength material in 1879. He was looking for filaments that would glow in his newfangled lightbulbs and turned to bamboo. The cellulose in bamboo strips carbonized in high heat and became capable of conducting electricity, enduring intense heat and glowing when a current passed through. Edison used these until he came upon a better filament material in tungsten metal.
Carbon fibers disappeared from the stage for nearly a century before coming back with a vengeance — now the tough material can be found in everything from spacecraft to sports goods and automobiles. With manufacturing techniques becoming cheaper and more efficient, carbon fiber will begin appearing in an even wider array of goods, from wind turbine blades to jet engines.
A string, a straw, a screw
Sometimes, it’s a simple thing. In the 1930s, serial inventor Joseph Friedman was sitting at his brother’s fountain parlor with his daughter, Judith. The two were having a pleasant enough time, waiting for their milkshakes to arrive. When they finally did, Judith was too small and couldn’t reach the straight paper straw’s top from her stool.
Friedman looked at the problem and an idea popped into his head.
He inserted a screw into the paper straw and tightly wrapped dental floss around the threads. When he removed the screw, a corrugated, accordion-like section was left in the straw that allowed it to bend in any direction without splitting or pinching.
Feeling Inspired? Check out the GE Store, a marketplace of imagination that is reinventing industry by mixing and matching GE technology in unexpected ways.
