The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (23 page)

When the light was turned on, the electricity flowed from the battery into this circuit and magnetized my two nails—one of which was situated slightly closer to my bar magnet. The polarity is determined by which direction the current runs in, and I’d wrapped the nails with wire so the one closest to the magnet pushed, while the other nail pulled. This pushing and pulling from both sides kept the bar magnet delicately balanced, never knowing what to do.

In the event of a power surge, this balance would be broken. The nail closest to the bar magnet would receive the surge first, pushing it vigorously into the other nail, knocking the pen spring loose from the wire, and breaking the circuit and flow of current.

Once this was built, I nailed the circuit breaker box to my wall just above the battery. Every night I sat on my bed and stared at the box, waiting for it to work. I got my wish about two weeks later when a cyclone hit my house.

I’d been in the trading center all day, and when I returned, I noticed something odd. Bits and pieces of my thatch roof were lying in the yard, and my roof itself looked as if a giant had given my house a good shaking. My mother came out from the kitchen.

“What happened?” I said.

“A big cyclone just came from the fields. We had to run inside.”

When I went inside my room, I saw that my poor roof had collapsed again and bits of ceiling were all over the floor. I also noticed that the circuit breaker had flipped. I moved the magnet back to the middle, but it refused. I tried again, but the magnet swung back into the nail. After disconnecting the battery, I followed my wires along the ceiling and discovered they’d become tangled in the cyclone winds. After separating the wires and reconnecting the battery, the bar magnet flipped back between the two nails. Once again, I’d narrowly escaped a fire.

But I was more excited about my circuit breaker than anything.

“See, man, the house would be ashes right now,” I told Geoffrey. “All of my clothes and blankets would be gone. The circuit breaker worked!”

“The circuit breaker is great,” he said. “But I think a better solution would be to fix your roof.”

A
NY NEW INVENTION IS
going to have its share of problems, and aside from the amateur wiring, one of my other headaches was the bike chain. Whenever the wind blew very hard and spun the blades, the chain would snap or simply jump off the teeth of the sprocket, forcing me to climb up the tower to fix it. This required stopping the blades, a task I hated.

One morning I was sleeping really well, one of those peaceful sleeps just before the cock crows. I think I was even smiling in my dreams when a terrible racket forced me awake. I knew just what it was. The chain had slipped again. I heard the wind whipping the acacia tree outside and my tower was rocking back and forth. The blades were spinning so fast they were buzzing on the rotor. If I didn’t fix them, they’d eventually snap in two, flying through the air like daggers. This frightening thought was enough to push me out of my warm bed.

Earlier, I’d come up with a wonderful plan of installing a brake system that would stop the blades by simply pulling a handle. It would be similar to the coaster brakes that stop a bicycle by pedaling backwards. These brakes work by using a special hub, which contains a gear system that locks when backward motion is applied. The plan was to attach this hub to the shaft, then trigger it by jerking a cable from below—ideally one that ran into my room so I wouldn’t have to get out of bed to operate it. But after weeks of searching, I couldn’t find the right hub, and so I had no braking system in place. This morning I had to do it the hard way.

I climbed to the top of the tower and, as usual, kicked off my flip-flops so I could get a better grip. But the wind was violent and angry, pushing the tower from side to side so much that I thought it would tip. I
wrapped my legs through the rungs and held on for life. But in trying to keep my balance, I didn’t notice the bicycle frame swinging forward along with the tower. The next gust of wind sent the blades straight into my hand and knocked me off balance. I slipped and nearly fell, grabbing hold of the rungs and cursing. Looking at my hand, I saw the blades had shaved the meat off three of my knuckles, which were now dripping blood that scattered with the wind.

“You are my own creation!” I shouted to my windmill. “So why are you trying to destroy me? Please, let me help you.”

Once I regained my balance, I pulled a thick strip of bicycle tire from my pocket that I’d cut for such repairs. Gripping it in the palm of my hand, I held my breath and grabbed hold of the spinning sprocket. I felt the jagged teeth cutting into the rubber like a saw blade.

“Stop!”

Once I managed to stop the blades, I shoved the bent bicycle spoke into the wheel to keep the machine from spinning, then reattached the chain. The next time this happened, I wasn’t so lucky. The teeth on the sprocket finally cut through the bike tire and ripped my flesh. Then it happened again. I still have scars from this whole painful period.

D
URING THIS TIME
, G
EOFFREY
was still working with Uncle Musaiwale at the maize mill in Chipumba. He’d been hired to sweep the floor and fetch things for our uncle whenever he needed them. But once there, our uncle mostly drank, and Geoffrey was forced to run the mill on his own. He’d wake up early and do maintenance work on the machines, making sure they were filled with diesel and oil. Then he would open for business. At night, he shared a bedroom with Musaiwale, who’d come home from the bars singing merrily before collapsing into a deep, snoring sleep.

Chipumba was about twenty-five kilometers away, and almost once a month, Geoffrey would bike home and tell me about his hard life as a workingman.

A close-up of my windmill with the improved pulley system. As you can see, I kept the bike chain as a rope to remind myself of the pain and scars it caused me.
Photographs courtesy of Tom Rielly

“They force me to ride up five hills to get diesel,” he said. “And on the way back the fuel soaks my clothes. I’m telling you, brother, I’m missing you guys terribly.”

But he also described how the grinding machines in the mill operated by using pulleys and rubber belts.

“You can get rid of this chain problem if you use a belt,” he said. “They use them on the mill, and they never fail.”

This was great news. A pulley was just what I needed to increase the tension between the front and back sprockets, which was the reason the chain kept flying off. And unlike a chain, a belt didn’t have troublesome cogs that constantly required grease, which I’d long run out of.

Going to the scrapyard, I was easily able to find two pulleys from an old water-pumping engine. I used a piece of heavy steel and hammered at them for several hours, snapping their cotter pins and sliding them off the machine. But the center hole of the larger pulley was too big for my shock-absorber shaft to fit. I had to weld it alongside the sprocket itself.

These days, Mister Godsten the welder no longer made fun of me. Whenever he saw me walking up holding these random pieces, he just smiled and fired up his torch.

“Tell me where,” he said.

Mister Godsten even let me use his grinder to flatten all those sharp teeth on the sprocket until its edges were smooth. It felt like sweet revenge watching them reduce to nothing under a shower of sparks.

“This is for all my scars!” I shouted.

Once I installed the pulleys that afternoon, they seemed to work great. The only problem was that I didn’t have a proper belt. Looking around for something to hold me over, I cut the handle off an old nylon bag and rigged it around the pulleys. It worked for about ten seconds before slipping off. I then cut open a few batteries and removed the black jelly inside—a kind of tar that houses the cell’s carbon rod—hoping that would work as an adhesive. But the tar simply wore away after a few hours. An old man in the trading center then gave me an actual belt from a milling machine—he was using it to fasten vegetables to his bike—but it was broken in half, forcing me to mend it constantly with my crochet needle and fiber from a car tire. That never lasted long. But with nothing else, I was forced to use this for two months. Even after all that trouble, I was still climbing the tower twice a day.

Finally, Geoffrey returned from Chipumba with a good belt that worked beautifully. At last, no more injuries on the job! Even better, no more getting out of bed in the early mornings to climb the tower. Instead, when the first crow of the cock stirred me from my dreams—which it always did—the steady hum of the spinning machine would sing me back to sleep. But that cock was a persistent one, and often, not even my windmill could guarantee my rest.

“CHICKEN!”
I screamed. “If you don’t shut up, it will be your skinny neck spinning from those blades!”

“COCK-A-DOODLE-DOOOOOO!!!!”

It was no use. Conquering darkness on the farm was hard enough, but a noisy chicken—that was impossible.

A
FTER ALL THESE LONG
months, I’d hoped that my father’s crops would be good enough that we could pay my back fees and I could return to school. But the famine debts had been too overwhelming, and as the start of a new school term at Kachokolo grew closer, we still had no money, not even enough for tobacco seed or fertilizer. Without a tobacco crop, we had nothing to sell, which meant we had no money for the remainder of the year. In fact, it would be several years before we were able to plant another crop of tobacco.

Instead we began growing crops that didn’t need fertilizer and could be easily sold in the market, things such as soybeans, groundnuts, and beans. But even though it was great to have these extra commodities to sell, the prices weren’t high enough in the market to make any serious money—certainly not enough to send me back to school.

One afternoon my father and I were listening to the radio while working the fields, when an advertisement came on for a local private school.

“Come to Kaphuka Private School,” an announcer said. “Gifted teachers, excellent exam scores, and easy installment plans. Don’t waste time! Come to Kaphuka!”

These schools often bought radio spots, usually torturing me as I sat
at home doing nothing. But this time I saw the ad as a good opportunity to raise the question, even though I already knew the answer.

“Papa, what do you think? What about this school? What’s happening with my schooling?”

“Well,” he said, “we’re looking into it. I hope when all these debts are said and done, we’ll be able to send you back.”

I’m sure it ripped my father apart to get these questions. Not wishing to argue, I accepted his answer and kept on working.

That January, I watched as all my friends returned to class, telling jokes and laughing on the road to Kachokolo. I still saw Gilbert and the others in the trading center for games of
bawo,
and when any of them said things like, “So William, when shall we see you again at school?” or boasted about their good marks on exams, I said nothing, or simply told them, “Please, I’d rather not talk about it.” After a while, no one did.

On any given day, you can visit the trading center and see a lot of boys who’ve dropped out of school and are now doing nothing. Instead of farming or trying to return to school, they’re hanging outside the CHiPiKU store in their dirty, tattered clothing, working
ganyu
all day and drinking it away all night. Many of them become only dark shapes through the open door of the Ofesi Boozing Centre, or the zombies who stumble home each morning from the
kachaso
dens.

In Malawi, we say these people are “grooving” through life, just living off small
ganyu
and having no real plan. I started worrying that I would become like them, that one day the windmill project would lose its excitement or become too difficult to maintain, and all my ambitions would fade into the maize rows. Forgetting dreams is easy.

To fight that kind of darkness, I kept returning to the library every week even though I had no idea if or when I’d ever return to school. I kept going so I could increase my general knowledge, and so I would remain inspired. I read all of the library’s novels—many of them about the dangers of HIV and AIDS—and spelling books to practice my poor English. And of course, I continued borrowing the books
Explaining Physics, Using En
ergy,
and
Integrated Science.
Lately, I’d become particularly curious about water pumps, refrigeration systems, and ways to make alternative fuels.

The windmill had been such a success that I began to feel a bit of pressure. I began to see myself like a famous reggae star who’d released a smash album, and now had to produce another hit. Each day at the library, I pored over my texts and tried to come up with my next big idea. The fans were waiting—at least I hoped they were.

Many of those who’d come to see my windmill had suggested similar things: “This looks like a transmitter,” or “If you can make this electric wind, you can make a transmitter. That’s what it looks like anyway.”

This made me curious to see how a transmitter actually worked, and after thinking about it for a while, I went to Geoffrey’s house with an idea.

“Eh,
these people are always saying our windmill is a transmitter, so let’s give them what they want.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s build a radio station.”

That afternoon, we took out two junker radios from our bag of parts, ones that didn’t even have covers attached. First I wanted to test a theory. One night a few weeks before, there’d been a big thunderstorm, and I’d gone inside my room with the radio. I was listening to the Sunday Top Twenty when a huge crack of lightning exploded in the sky. When it did, I heard a blip on my program, as if the lightning had sliced through my signal.

So taking the two radios, I tuned one to a static frequency, then took the second and tuned it to the same place on the dial. When this happened, the second radio went silent: no white noise, nothing. As with the lightning bolt, perhaps the frequency from one radio was penetrating the other? If that was true, surely I could put my own sound on top of that frequency.

One of the radios I was using was a Walkman with a radio and a cassette player. So leaving the first radio tuned to the white noise, I took the Walkman and switched it to tape mode. I saw that wires ran from the
Walkman’s tape head to the speakers, so I unhooked them from the speakers and reconnected them to the player’s condenser. Because the condenser controlled the frequency, perhaps the cassette music meant for the speakers could instead catch a ride on a frequency wave straight into its fellow radio.

I put my Black Missionaries tape in the deck.

“Here it goes,” I said.

I pressed play. Sure enough, the music played loud and clear in the other radio! The Walkman was now my transmitter, meaning that if I had five radios tuned to the same frequency, they’d all be playing the Black Missionaries.

“Now, Mister Geoffrey,” I said, “how can I do this with my voice?”

So I unhooked the wires from the condenser and rewired them to a separate headphone speaker, making a microphone. I pressed play and began talking into the mic.

“One two, one two,” I said.

I could hear my voice coming from the other player.

“Good afternoon, Malawi. This is your host William Kamkwamba, along with his trusty sidekick, Mister Geoffrey. Your regularly scheduled program has been interrupted.”

After that, Geoffrey and I began experimenting with our little radio station. Geoffrey walked outside with the radio, while I stayed in my room singing his favorite Billy Kaunda songs. Even outside, Geoffrey could hear my voice loud and clear. I was really working up a sweat.

“My ears are bleeding!” he yelled. “But please, carry on! This is cool!”

But the farther he got from my bedroom, the weaker the signal became. Beyond three hundred feet, the signal just finally disappeared, which must’ve been good news for Geoffrey on account of my lousy voice.

“If we only had an amplifier, we could broadcast to distances farther away,” I said.

But Geoffrey was scared we would be arrested by the authorities for messing with their frequencies. People were also saying this nonsense
about my windmill: “You better be careful or ESCOM power will come arrest you.”

If the first people to experiment with great inventions such as radios, generators, or airplanes had been afraid of being arrested, we’d never be enjoying those things today.

“Let them come arrest me,” I’d say. “It would be an honor.”

S
OON
I
WAS ATTACKING
every idea with its own experiment. Over the course of the next year, there was hardly a moment when I wasn’t planning or devising some new scheme. And though the windmill and radio transmitter had both been successes, I couldn’t say the same for a few other experiments.

The project I was most anxious to get working was a water pump—which had been part of my original idea ever since I’d seen windmills in the book. Although the windmill-driven pump wouldn’t come until later, I started work on a prototype pump just to play around with the concept. I modeled it after a picture in
Explaining Physics
of a force pump, which uses a piston and a series of valves to push water through an outlet. The examples illustrated in the book were a car windscreen washer, which I’d never used, and a handheld bicycle pump, which I knew very well.

The shallow well at our house, where we got water for cleaning and bathing, was forty feet deep, so first I needed to find a pipe long enough to reach the bottom. I remembered seeing some pipes in the scrapyard that had once been used for irrigation and were still buried in the ground. So taking my hoe, I went one morning and started digging them up, a process that took two whole days.

The pipes were perfect. The first was a wide PVC pipe, which I could use as my outer barrel. I placed it down the well until I felt it hit the bottom. The second pipe was metal and much thinner, perfect for my piston. Mister Godsten welded a round washer to the end of the metal pipe and left its center hole open. Around the washer I attached a thick piece of bike rubber that would act as the inlet valve, or seal. I then had the
welder bend the metal pipe at the top into a ninety-degree angle to create a handle.

When the metal rod was pushed up and down, it created a kind of vacuum inside the plastic pipe. While pulling up on the handle, the water was sucked into the plastic pipe, and when you pushed the handle back down, the rubber seal opened and pressure pushed the water to the surface. The water traveled up the plastic pipe and out a channel hole I’d melted in the side.

But the problem was that the rubber valve created too much friction against the plastic pipe. My sisters, and even women from the next village, had started using the pump, but soon they found it too difficult to operate.

“I can’t manage this thing,” said my mother. “It feels stuck.”

I tried greasing the pipe, but the cold water made the grease as thick as jelly and it didn’t spread evenly. I soon gave it up.

The pump wasn’t so successful, but my failure in drawing water paled in comparison to my attempt to create biogas.

As I mentioned earlier, deforestation in Malawi has made it very difficult to find firewood for cooking, and gathering wood only adds to this destructive cycle. If there was a good harvest of maize, we usually had enough dried cobs to burn for about four months. But once we’d gone through that, the hunt for wood began.

Each day, my mother or my sisters walked several kilometers to the small blue gum forest near Kachokolo to cut down a bundle of thin trees—a chore that took at least three hours. Most of these trees were alive and green and had to be set aside for nearly five days to dry. This was usually too long to wait, so we burned them anyway, causing thick white smoke to pour from the kitchen windows. Looking inside, I’d see my poor mother stirring the pot of
nsima,
squeezing her eyes closed as tears ran down her cheeks. All the girls in my family developed nasty coughs each year.

In Malawi, every woman has this same burden. And I knew that soon these journeys to find wood would take so long we’d never have our meals. Furthermore, the cycle of deforestation would worsen and create greater
problems of drought and flooding. Someone had to help save our women and trees, and I thought,
why not me?

Ever since I’d built the windmill, several women had asked, “Does electric wind produce enough power for your mother to cook?” Unfortunately, it didn’t.

My windmill didn’t supply enough voltage to power a proper cooker, so I went in search for other ideas. A few weeks before, I’d been experimenting again with wires and batteries. I’d taken a thick piece of grass—the kind we used to build our roofs and fences—and wrapped it with wire about twenty times. I connected both ends to a twelve-volt cell and felt it heat up. Soon the wire was glowing red hot and the grass caught fire in my hands. It was a simple, kind of childish experiment, but it gave me my next idea.

Okay,
I thought,
maybe I can do something with this to boil water.
I couldn’t place a metal pot atop a coil of wire because it would only act as a conductor. A clay pot would simply crush the coil. So I fashioned the coil like a magic wand, complete with a plastic handle made from a hollowed-out ballpoint pen. These coils with handles existed already—I’d seen them in the trading center—but they were powered by ESCOM electricity instead of batteries. I hooked a wire to the twelve-volt battery and connected it to the coil, below the handle. I dipped the coil into the water. In about five minutes, it was boiling.

But this was too simple. I had to go bigger. My
Integrated Science
book had a small section on alternative fuels, such as solar power and hydro—both of which I’d studied. But it also mentioned something called biogas, which was made by converting animal waste into liquid fuel, which could then be used for cooking. It explained how the animal waste was buried in a pit. As it heated up over a matter of months, the gas it produced could be tapped through a long valve.

I don’t need a pit,
I thought.
And I certainly don’t need to wait that long.

Devising my own plan, I snuck into my mother’s kitchen and snatched the big, round clay pot she used for making beans. All I needed now was the
“organic matter,” and I didn’t have to look far. Across the compound, Aunt Chrissy kept two goats in a wooden pen behind her house. The ground was covered in their marble-shaped poop. Taking a sugar bag, I made sure nobody was looking and climbed over the fence and into the pen. The goats retreated to the corner and looked at me strangely, but I carried on. I filled the sack until it was spilling over and walked back to the kitchen.

My mother was out working in the garden, which gave me plenty of time and space to work. I dumped the poop into the clay pot and filled it halfway with water, until the brown marbles were swimming around. I then covered the top with plastic
jumbos
and tied a rope around the lip of the bowl, sealing it tight. For my valve, I clipped the top off a radio antenna, creating a hollow tube, then poked it through the center of the plastic. I then corked the top with a reed.