Now THIS is Art, this is Hip-Hop

by B.J. on 2/01/2008 11:31:00 PM 0 comments Print this post

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...from the Wall sTrEet (sic) Journal.



"On a continent woefully short of electricity, 20-year-old William Kamkwamba has a dream: to power up his country one windmill at a time.

So far, he has built three windmills in his yard here, using blue-gum trees and bicycle parts."

"At first, we were laughing at him," says Agnes Kamkwamba, his mother. "We thought he was doing something useless."

The laughter ended when he hooked up his windmill to a thin copper wire, a car battery and a light bulb for each room of the family's main house.

The family soon started enjoying the trappings of modern life: a radio and, more recently, a TV. They no longer have to buy paraffin for lantern light. Two of Mr. Kamkwamba's six sisters stay up late studying for school."


Pictures of how his mill originally looked like.

It's stuff like this that dreams are made of.

The dude has a blog.

This is a video of the man speaking about how he built his windmill...at age 14. When I was 14, I was overweight and playing basketball at the YMCA. The only thing I contributed to my community was revenues for the YMCA.

"William says after dropping out of school in 2002, because he could not raise schools fees, he had nothing to do and grew an interest in reading science books…

He says one day while reading he came across two books, Using Energy and How it Works, which are about generation of electricity using a windmill."

People engineering, that's hip-hop.

(On a sidenote: It's interesting how the Wall Street Journal completely oversimplified what he did. They make it seem as if he picked up the ability to build windmills just by looking at a picture.

This is what happened according to the blog and straight from William's words)

"On a trial and error basis, he managed to make a small windmill which generated electricity enough to light his dorm. Seeing its success he planned for a bigger one so that his parents could benefit and some well-wishers gave him money to get some of the materials he needed.")

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