Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
More than one and a half billion people around the
world live without electricity. Finding better ways
to bring light to the poor is the goal of
researchers like David Irvine-Halliday.
In the late nineteen nineties, the Canadian
professor was working in Nepal when his return
flight was cancelled. A delay gave him time to take
a fourteen-day hiking trip in the Himalayas.
As he tells it, one day he looked in the window of a
school and noticed how dark it was. This is a common
problem for millions of children around the world --
and not just at school, but also at home.
Many families use kerosene oil lamps. There are many
problems with these lamps. They produce only a small
amount of light. They are dangerous to breathe. And
they are a big fire danger, causing many injuries
and deaths each year.
Kerosene costs less than other forms of lighting,
but it is still costly in poor countries.
Professor Irvine-Halliday says many people spend
well over one hundred dollars a year on the fuel.
When he returned to Canada, he began researching
ways to provide safe, clean and affordable lighting.
He began experimenting with light-emitting diodes,
L.E.D.s, at his laboratory at the University of
Calgary in Alberta. As a professor of renewable
energy, he already knew about the technology.
Light-emitting diodes are small glass lamps that use
much less electricity than traditional bulbs and
last much longer.
Professor Irvine-Halliday used a one-watt bright
white L.E.D. made in Japan. He found it on the
Internet and connected it to a bicycle-powered
generator.
He remembers thinking it was so bright, a child
could read by the light of a single diode.
In two thousand, after much research and many
experiments, he returned to Nepal to put the systems
into homes. His Light Up the World Foundation has
now equipped the homes of twenty-five thousand
people in fifty-one countries.
He says the one-time cost of the system is less than
one hundred dollars. So one year of kerosene would
pay for a solid-state lighting system.
Now his aim is to develop a lower-cost lighting
system. In January, David Irvine-Halliday left the
University of Calgary. He has also decided to give
up leadership in the Light Up the World Foundation
to start a company in India.
And that's the VOA Special English Development
Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
