First I will warn you that I am an architect by training; a 'problem solver', but not an electrical engineer. So please bear with my different way of explaining my ideas.
Two years ago a public television program in the U.S. told how "reCaptchas" were the idea of a young professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He was frustrated at the idea of millions of people wasting a few precious seconds every time they had to type the strange nonsense letters required by websites, in order to defeat bot programs accessing their website.
Rather than wasting this mental energy worldwide, he suggested using the text which was illegible to computers which were digitizing every book ever written.
Suddenly the efforts to digitize the world's written texts were expedited 1000%, all because a few moments of mental energy had been captured from millions of people.
Using this train of thought... why must power come from large dams, solar arrays, wind generators? Why not small bits of energy produced by millions.
For the present, we see the greatest amount of clean energy coming from hydro-electric dams. The heat of the sun lifts water from the oceans to the sky and the rain falls, filling rivers with this huge potential energy we capture with our great dams.
Likewise, the sun grows the crops humans eat, giving them the energy to walk, lifting their weight with each step and letting gravity pull them back to earth.
Harvest that energy wasted in every footfall with a mechanical, chemical, pressure or motion powered device built into the heel of a shoe.
Then every step taken by a man would be capable of perhaps charging a battery, or a phone or a light.
The people who walk the most, in the under-developed countries of the world, would see the greatest benefit.
This could be an attachment to a shoe, but built into the shoe would be best. There are already available cheap hand-powered flashlights operated by lever action.
A smaller, version of this with proper electronic modules should be able to send the power to a battery or at least a USB plug.
As I said, I am not an electrical engineer, nor a shoe manufacturer nor an entrepreneur, so I thought one of you might take up the idea, or suggest some other venue where I might send this proposal.
Wouldn't it be nice if Nike liked the idea?
