
Bottle light inventor proud to be poor - kposehn
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23536914
======
etler
This isn't an alternative to the light bulb. This is an alternative to the
window for people living in slums that can't afford glass.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
Probably you've never seen a slum, so let me explain:

\- Houses are juxtaposed to each other, there's no room for windows

\- Roofs are corrugated, so you can't easily fit a top glass panel even if you
have the money for one.

\- There are transparent, fiber glass roofs, and some people use those, but
often they don't get to choose the materials used to build the house, just use
what is available.

So this is a quite nice hack that works for most houses.

~~~
throwaway9848
All those sound plausible (having never been to a favela), and if true I agree
with you on almost all counts.

But it's still not a substitute for a light bulb unless it works in the dark.

~~~
revdinosaur
I'm not sure that's fair. It is bulb shape and it emits light. The source of
the light happens to be the sun. This is kind of like saying that tungsten
lamps aren't lightbulbs because they don't work when not supplied with
electricity. They're truly acting as a substitute by spreading light around a
darkened area.

~~~
zorbo
We're just arguing semantics here.

------
rickdale
The title of this article bothers me since the article focuses much more on
the bottle and light and rather than how poor and proud Alfredo Moser is.
Regardless, pretty cool exposure of life in the slums, I'd bet there are more
'hacks' as a means of survival that are necessary there, but we wouldn't think
twice about.

I will say the article is good, just don't like the title.

~~~
throwaway420
I can understand being proud of a beneficial invention and offering something
to people without taking money for it. He's done an amazing good deed and
hopefully will be remembered for this. But I don't understand the title of the
article because I think taking pride in poverty is a weird position to be
taking. The headline might just be catchy click bait.

~~~
e3pi
Proud to be poor?

Not paying taxes into NSA surveillance/military state or any whatever
exploitive capitalism as other collared proles. Some people are far too busy
than to concern themselves with financial vanity and the distractions that
follow it.

Teeming masses of slum youth with linux netbooks must be high on the list of
Fort Meade's threat matrix.

~~~
throwaway420
* You can be proud of opposing the NSA and the MIC and other mechanisms of destruction without volunteering for a life of destitution.

* You're free to do whatever you want, but I don't think that embracing poverty is a good solution to the NSA or the MIC. Mass poverty means that the government controls everybody's means of survival (foodstamps, healthcare, etc) which equals total political control. I think that creating business solutions and voluntary organizations that oppose these things is a more viable path, and having money helps with that. Start up a secure email webservice. Startup a charity organization that can help bring relief and attention to innocent civilians being bombed or harmed by governments.

* Your stance on capitalism being exploitative is a logical contradiction. A voluntary transaction can only occur in a market when both sides of a trade value what they are getting more than what they are giving up.

* What we have today as an economic system is not capitalism - governments dictate the winners and losers in the marketplace and those companies with the best lobbyists always win rather than the companies who create the most value for customers.

* You don't need to be a collared prole, to use your terminology. Software is all free and open source now. Start a business with some friends and live an alternative lifestyle to being a 9-5 corporate man. That's what a lot of people here currently do or are working towards.

* Not being poor doesn't automatically equate to financial vanity.

~~~
jcmoscon
Excellent answer!

------
julianpye
True hacker, if I ever saw one.

------
D9u
I live off-grid, and have done so for nearly 20 years, and I never needed
indoor lighting during daylight hours.

I also dislike the idea of poking holes in my roof, for any reason.

I'm much more intersted in the gravity light which was featured here a few
months ago.

[http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gravitylight-lighting-
for-...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gravitylight-lighting-for-
developing-countries)

Although the initial cost may be prohibitive for the poverty stricken, it may
be well within the acceptable price range for many others, and the gravity
light has the added bonus of not requiring any fuel, nor does it require
punching holes in one's roof.

(I live in an upland rainforest)

~~~
Klinky
Lights are used indoors all day long in much of the world. If you don't like
poking holes in your roof, then you probably don't like sun windows either.

The gravity light requires manual labor to produce light, has moving parts
that are more likely to fail, is more costly, and produces less light.

~~~
duskwuff
The gravity light produces a _shamefully_ small amount of power - about 100 mW
("one deciwatt") by the manufacturer's own measurement. Even given the
increased efficiency of LEDs, the illumination provided by one of these
"bottle lights" is still about 100x greater, it's basically free, and it
doesn't require you to tend to it every 15 - 30 minutes.

~~~
tehwalrus
It would, however, work as an addition to bottle lights, to be used at night.

------
lightyrs
This headline is offensive. Nowhere in the article does he indicate that he is
proud to be poor. Not that there would be anything wrong with that — quite the
opposite, in fact, however, this headline reeks of elitism.

------
kefka
Hmm. This would also be really useful in doing underground greenhouses.

A tin sheet is cheap. You dig a hole, however long, wide, and deep. Then, you
can get in the hole and plant whatever in there. Once done, you can cover it
up with the sheet (or wood or whatever) and put the bottle-lights inside.

That way, you keep the pests out of your new garden.

~~~
mattgrice
It does not seem like that would be very practical.

Very few economically important plants will thrive in anything less than full
sunlight. This makes sense because most plants become economically important
because they are productive (good at turning sunlight into something we want
like calories or wood).

The exceptions are plants that are grown for some valuable quality which is
only needed in scarce quantities, like some spices or flowers.

~~~
PebblesRox
Yeah, I didn't understand the hydroponics comment at the end. How does it work
better to grow plants indoors than outside if you're using a limited amount of
sunlight indoors? Are there other factors that make it worth it?

------
e3pi
Down below, a deck prism illumination is astonishing. Drilling a round hole in
the cabin sole is way easier, and a discarded plastic bottle is far less
expensive than a vintage Criitenden & Willcox prism. Separate the bleach if
you get real thirsty? Watch your head(pun?).

~~~
jared314
Deck prisms:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_prism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_prism)

The main difference here is that deck prisms are flat on top, which limits the
amount of light entering the prism. The water in the bottles is filled to the
top, creating a dome shaped concentrator. Since water has a refractive index
close to glass (~1.3 vs ~1.5) the bottom of the bottle has a similar effect to
the deck prism, except with slightly more light.

------
tzm
This is effectively a lightbulb that uses wireless energy.

------
opminion
Interesting invention. For me, the main thing to learn from this is how much
some people depend on artificial light during daylight hours (a reminder of
how important hands-on experience is when hacking things to help others).

------
gngeal
The numbers don't make sense to me. "It depends on how strong the sun is but
it's more or less 40 to 60 watts." <\- I hope that's for the whole roof we see
in the picture, not for a single bottle. What's the insolation of a single
bottle top anyway? (Unless, of course, they're talking about your grandma's
old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs.)

~~~
sophacles
Well, at the surface, when the rays are hitting perpendicular to the planet,
it's 1000 W/m^2 (approx).

Of course the real problem is they are measuring the light in terms of
incandescent bulb power draw, rather than something useful like lumens or
candela, but due to a century of ubiquitous light bulbs, we've been rating
light in the wrong units.

------
JoeAltmaier
"The lamps work best with a black cap..." \- why would that be so? Wouldn't a
reflective cap work well too?

~~~
lutusp
All I can think of is that a black cap won't degrade as quickly because of
ultraviolet exposure. Most plastics (long polymers) have chemical bonds that
can be broken by the energy level provided by ultraviolet photons, so over
time they turn from polymers into quasicrystals and lose their strength --
disintegrate. But a black plastic, by excluding the ultraviolet light,
protects itself and lasts much longer.

So a bottle that's composed of a clear plastic that naturally resists
ultraviolet degradation (there are several) should be capped by a more rigid
plastic (to maintain its shape). So the cap needs to be black (or at least a
dark color).

A reflective cap would work just as well at first, but plastics are made
reflective by being painted, and the paint soon falls off, because of ... wait
for it ... ultraviolet exposure.

~~~
raldi
I thought black objects absorb all wavelengths, and white objects reflect them
all away.

~~~
eru
Real world materials are rarely ideal black bodies (or ideal reflectors).

~~~
lutusp
> Real world materials are rarely ideal black bodies (or ideal reflectors).

That's true, but it's also true that all objects eventually reach thermal
equilibrium with their surroundings. Were this not the case, it would violate
the law of energy conservation, and that's a law that's never broken.

In that sense, most objects, solids and plasmas in particular, are reasonable
black bodies once they achieve equilibrium. Some of them show spectral lines
-- emission, absorption or both -- but in most cases those lines appear on top
of a blackbody curve. The sun, for example -- perhaps surprisingly, it
exhibits a classic blackbody spectrum appropriate to its surface temperature,
with many spectral lines contributed primarily by its comparatively low-
pressure atmosphere
([http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Spectrum.png](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Spectrum.png)).

The state of matter least like a black body is a low-pressure molecular cloud
in space, which often shows only emission and absorption lines, no classic
blackbody curve. The lowest pressure gases show the narrowest spectral lines,
which is how we can estimate the pressure of a remote cloud of gas illuminated
by distant energy sources.

------
mnml_
You can't turn off the fucking thing.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
It automatically turns itself off at night. And then back on again in the
morning; and not in with the shocking "argh! my eyes!" suddenness of an
incandescent, but a gradual taper that allows your eyes to adjust slowly.

Also, you could use a cup and a rubber-band to cover it if you needed darkness
mid-day.

------
vincie
I thought of this general idea many years ago, but then decided it might be
better to cut up the bottles, flatten the plastic and sew the flat pieces
together to make panels to use in roofs and windows. Never got around to
actually doing anything about it though.

------
cafard
At some point, Heineken shipped mostly-oblong bottles to somewhere in the
Dutch West Indies for use in walls. I have the impression--I read this years
ago--that it was more or less a hobby of the owner. Still, it worked.

------
xanderstrike
My dad built a treehouse with exactly this with liter water bottles in ~1994,
he said he saw it when he was growing up with glass bottles. I hate to be a
spoil sport, but this is hardly a new idea.

~~~
marcosdumay
I've this guy on TV a long time ago. I'm certain it was at the 90's, but I
don't remember the exact year.

It's not a new idea in any way, and was certainly invented more than once.
Yet, it was this guy that (by luck) made the life of several people better by
communicating it.

------
return0
The comparison with edison is just ridiculous.

------
gadders
Daft title and poverty or wealth are morally neutral. You could be equally
proud of either.

------
Fuxy
That's such an obvious solution I can't believe nobody thought of that before
this guy.

Weird.

------
lbebber
Being very petulant here, but Uberaba is in the southwest, not in the south.

------
Arubis
I spent a bit over a year promoting and installing these devices in rural West
Africa (see [http://gamlight.org](http://gamlight.org)). I actually wasn't
aware of Mr. Moser, having taken inspiration directly from the Liter of Light
project ([http://literoflight.org](http://literoflight.org)).

In terms of light, a single bottle is insufficient, but ten are enough to
light up a mud block-walled, corrugate metal-roofed schoolroom. Since there's
virtually zero monitoring of kids' eye health and ability, that can mean the
difference between learning to read and learning to look like you're paying
attention for young students.

A few things to address:

Night: these things don't produce any light on their own (they're essentially
low-cost deck prisms). A lot of people in-country at the time I helped promote
these were excited at the possibility that a full moon might produce
sufficient light to see, but it's just not enough. You need to supplement
these things once the sun's down.

Windows: most of the buildings in rural West Africa are build of mud block,
which isn't the most stable or solid of construction materials. It's cheap and
readily available, but needs to be built thick and without large windows, or
with significant reinforcement to any large windows, or else it crumbles. That
means there's very little light coming into these rooms, even in the most sun-
kissed of places. Bottle bulbs are an order of magnitude cheaper than
installing iron-reinforced windows.

Transparent/translucent roofing: when this stuff is available at all, it's
questionable whether it will fit the corrugate pattern of an extant roof, and
the quality of the translucent roofing plastics we saw in The Gambia and
Senegal was quite low; it would go milky and then opaque over just a year or
two, and cost more than replacing a bottle bulb would. By contrast, you can
purchase corrugated tin roofing and roofing caulk in just about any West
African city, and relatively affordably at that. The bottles themselves can be
found cheaply or free anywhere that tourists or aid workers spend time.

Black caps: it's not the color that matters, it's covering the original cap
with something more durable. Once you've assured that there's no leaks in the
bottle-corrugate metal interface, the cap is the most likely point of failure
on these bulbs. The sun is STRONG in these places, which is a lot of stress on
opaque plastics; once weakened, a small crack is enough to emit water vapor,
and so a bottle bulb's contents would evaporate, requiring replacement.

The real tricks involved are getting a good seal between the bottle and the
corrugate tin (we used roof caulking), and making the whole process relatively
efficient (it can take a while to punch these out). Once you've got that down,
the production and installation process can be taught to locals, who in turn
can turn a profit with their labors. I worked with one carpenter for about a
year before returning to the states, and he's since picked up a few contracts
with the local ministry of education and a few individual customers to install
bottle lighting systems.

I would be happy to go on about these things for HOURS (and have, in the
past)! They're a niche solution, but they fit their niche _extremely_ well.

------
hcckhcck
goog one

------
gyom
The problem with the article is that they're obfuscating the fact that this
does not produce light. It's basically a smarter way to poke a hole through
your ceiling. It's not a device that converts energy into light.

~~~
eksith
Rather odd thing to say. How it works is explained in the second paragraph
after the intro :

"So how does it work? Simple refraction of sunlight, explains Moser, as he
fills an empty two-litre plastic bottle."

I agree that it does involve poking a hole through the ceiling, but the
thing's simplicity belies its utility and what may seem "obvious" after the
fact doesn't make it any less significant an invention.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus)

~~~
gyom
I saw that sentence with the word "refraction" and I wasn't sure if it was the
whole idea or if refraction was just one part of a clever design to enhance
the effects of another artificial light source.

That's why I felt it was misleading. Looking at the article again, though,
it's probably clearer than I originally thought it was.

------
jay_kyburz
Or you could just open a window.

~~~
wyz9
I think you’re not really understanding the kind of housing this is made for.
Shacks in slums don’t generally have nice triple glassed windows.

~~~
eru
Yes, the alternative would be going outdoors. But in the tropics you don't
want to do that during the midday sun.

~~~
Buzaga
No, people absolutely take the hot sun all the time when they have to go out,
they need it because their homes are dark even in the day and there's stuff
you want to do inside the house in the day, like cooking, cleaning,
studying...

~~~
eru
Yes, you have to be outside, but you wouldn't want to be, if you can avoid it.

------
palkeo
Did someone told him about « windows » ?

~~~
wyz9
Wow, I didn’t think there’d be _two_ comments saying this. This is about slums
in Brazil and the Philippines, you should look up the conditions of the
housing the people there live in. This is pretty high on the disconnection
from reality scale.

