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PREVIOUS HEROES

Of all the extraordinary people featured in our pages this the previous years, the editors have chosen Dave Irvine-Halliday and Christine Wandzura as our Heroes of Previous Years

DAVE IRVINE-HALLIDAY [Back]

Giving Light, Spreading Hope Nearly half the homes in the developing world are without light. This Calgary engineer wants to change that. By Bonnie Munday Dave Irvine-Halliday carefully picked his way along the Alpine trail, heading downhill on a clear spring day in 1997. The then- 54-year-old Canadian and his Nepalese trekking guide, Babu Ram Rimal, were hiking the Annapurna Circuit of the Himalayas, working their way back towards the town of Pokhara, which they hoped to reach in a few days. First, though, they planned to spend a night in the village of some of Babu’s relatives. Athletically built, with salt-and-pepper hair, Irvine-Halliday was thoroughly enjoying his unexpected Himalayan adventure. A leading fibre-optic specialist, the Scottish-born professor in the electrical-engineering department at the University of Calgary was on sabbatical and had just finished a monthlong stint at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, helping set up a lab in its engineering department. But when he agreed to extend his stay to do a lecture, it meant missing his flight, leaving him with some time on his hands. So the keen climber decided to do something he’d always dreamed of: He arranged a Himalayan trek. The afternoon light fading, Irvine-Halliday and Babu entered the mountain-shadowed village of Manang and headed for a modest stone-and-mud hut. A middle-aged man and woman greeted the trekkers warmly, invited them inside and put a pot of water on the wood fire to make tea. The dwelling was so dim and heavy with smoke from the fire pit that when Irvine-Halliday reached for the mug the woman handed him, he could hardly see it. They all chatted excitedly, Babu interpreting for Irvine-Halliday. It would be nice to see their faces, the Canadian thought, smiling and squinting through the acrid smoke. But this remote area was not on a power grid. Only when the group ventured outside a little later that evening was Irvine-Halliday able to see his hosts clearly. A few days later, near the end of the trek, Irvine-Halliday, walking ahead of Babu, came upon a stone schoolhouse and stopped to peer through its small windows. It was remarkably dark inside. How do they see what they’re reading? he wondered. It niggled at him for the rest of the journey and the flight home. Without light, these people can’t read, he thought. Their children can’t do homework. And those kerosene lamps they’re using are a fire hazard. He had to find a better way to light up the villages of Nepal. “I’m going to see what I can do for them,” he told his wife, Jenny, when he got home, and he set to work in his lab at the university. He knew he’d need not only a source of light but a source of power for the light. Whatever he came up with would have to be simple, durable and economical. For his light source, he concentrated on working with light-emitting diodes (LEDs)—a solid-state type of lighting like the red “on” light on a stereo—since they require very little energy. As far as he knew, they were available only in colours, and his attempts to bunch a few together to create a light someone could read by failed miserably given their limited strength. He moved on to coming up with an energy source to power a light. But to do so would cost money. He asked Jenny, who loved his idea of bringing light to those who needed it, for advice. She said, “Let’s put some money into it ourselves.” The former nurse had a small clothing-design business with a line of credit, and the couple decided to finance the equipment Irvine-Halliday needed with their savings and three credit cards, and use the line of credit to pay off the cards. For hours on evenings and weekends over the next several months, Irvine-Halliday experimented. He ruled out alkaline and dry-cell batteries: Not only do they die quickly but they’re expensive and hazardous to the environment when they’re discarded. And he carefully considered wind and solar power, but ruled both out as unfeasible and overly expensive. One day nearly two years after his Nepal trip, Irvine-Halliday sat at his computer typing random words like “illumination” and “LED” into search engines. When he put in “illumination products,” up popped the web page of a Japanese company called Nichia. Irvine-Halliday did a double take. There was a photo of a diode, and a banner that read “White LED.” Irvine-Halliday read that the company had invented the 0.1-watt light three years earlier. He grabbed the phone to call the company’s U.S. office in Detroit. On the other end of the line, a representative listened to his story, then said Nichia would be happy to send him a dozen diodes to check out. Will they be bright enough to read by? he wondered. When the package arrived at the university a few days later, Irvine-Halliday grabbed technician John Shelley and the two rushed to the lab. They took one of the tiny diodes and connected its two wires to the positive and negative terminals on a power supply. Irvine-Halliday put a single sheet of typed paper beside it, then Shelley closed the lab’s door and turned off the lights. When they switched on the lamp, the tabletop was bathed in a soft light. “Good God, John,” Irvine-Halliday exclaimed, “a child could read by the light of a single diode!” To light up a bigger area, he’d need only to bunch a few diodes together. But there was still the problem of how to power the lights efficiently and inexpensively. What about pedal power? the professor wondered. Anyone could pedal a stationary bike for a short time each day, he reasoned, to charge a 12-volt lead-acid battery of the type used in motorbikes; these batteries could last up to five years powering a low-energy light. He got to work building a pedal generator, adjusting it until he could pedal at a leisurely pace seated in a chair while holding a book in his hands. Then Irvine-Halliday ensured the rotating shaft didn’t go to waste, rigging it alternately to a bobbin, for spinning wool or cotton, or a grinder, for sharpening knives or axes. It was a highly efficient, functional invention. Irvine-Halliday created the Nepal Light Project and bought about 400 LEDs from Nichia. With these, he made some experimental lamps, then journeyed back to Nepal in May 1999. About 6:30 one evening, high up in the mountains, Dave and Jenny Irvine-Halliday sat at the supper table in a powerless guesthouse with their host. They all had to shout above the roar of the pressurized kerosene lantern set in front of them. But Irvine-Halliday had strung up one of his LED lamps, connected to a fully charged battery he’d brought along, and the lamp hovered just over the table. Now he asked his host to turn off the lantern, and the professor flicked the switch on the LED lamp. In the quiet, illuminated room, there were big smiles all around the table. “Can you please leave that lamp here?” his host asked as the family and guests enjoyed their meal of lentils and rice. “After we’d gone to a few more villages and got a similar positive response,” recalls Irvine-Halliday, “I realized that this could be bigger than Nepal, so we established the Light Up the World Foundation (LUTW).” When he returned to Nepal in the spring of 2000 with a large supply of lamps and pedal generators and lit up his first village, it was an “unbelievable feeling.” Since then, LUTW and subsequent affiliates have provided light for some 3,500 to 4,000 homes in, among other countries, Nepal , India, Mexico, Guatemala and Bolivia. The recipients are responsible for generating power for their lamps (most now use solar power, followed by hydro and pedal power) and must pay a minimal fee into a village maintenance fund. But they now have light systems that will last decades, for a total cost of $90 to $110 each—much cheaper than the $70 cost of just a year’s supply of kerosene and candles. Today, Irvine-Halliday uses a California-based LED manufacturer called Lumileds to supply LUTW with the diodes at discount prices. The Irvine-Hallidays just paid off the money they tapped from their credit cards. (The foundation has three full-time employees—not including Irvine-Halliday, whose only income is his professor’s salary—and half a dozen volunteers.) These days, LUTW’s lighting projects are funded by donations from organizations and individuals in Canada and the United States, and by award money it has received for its humanitarian initiative. What’s Dave Irvine-Halliday’s ultimate goal? “Just look at the name of our foundation,” he says. “I want us to light up the world.” For more information about LUTW and their activities, visit www.lightupthe world.org or call 403-220-4230.