Like many people who use the power of their legs to get from Point A to Point B, I’m always looking for ways to be more self-sufficient and less consumerist in non-transportation aspects of my life. One way to do that is to use human-powered appliances and machinery that would normally require electricity or gasoline. There are many places to buy ready-made products like bike blenders and some sources for making your own stuff, but not many sources that combine the two.
Fortunately, there’s a new book available by Tamara Dean called The Human-Powered Home that functions as both a how-to manual and a history of human-powered machinery. Ms. Dean will be in Chicago on Thursday at an event at the Chicago Center for Green Technology, which is unfortunately the closest she’s coming to Champaign-Urbana on her book tour, but after the jump she discusses many topics, from what human-powered appliances she uses to the future of human-driven electrical generation.
Smile Politely: How much traveling did you do to research the book? Did you visit Maya Pedal or any of the other outside-the-U.S. places referenced?
Tamara Dean: I try to keep long-distance travel to a minimum because of air travel’s negative effects on the environment. So no, I didn’t travel outside the U.S. to research the book, as much as I would have liked to visit Maya Pedal in Guatemala, for example. I did take trips to northern California and Massachusetts, places where there happened to be a concentration of many human-power inventors, and I visited several contacts in the Midwest, closer to home.
SP: How many human-powered items do you have around your home at any given time? How many do you use on a daily (or weekly) basis?
TD: My partner David and I human-power many things. Every morning, we use a hand-cranked coffee grinder. In the summer we mow the lawn with a reel mower and uproot young weeds between rows in the garden with a push cultivator made from old bicycle parts (the same one whose plan is in the book). We cut larger weeds and grasses with a scythe. Last week my family and I made over 3 gallons of apple cider with a human-powered cider press and shelled dozens of ears of blue corn we’d grown this summer with a hand-cranked corn sheller. We have a pedal-powered grain mill set up in the dining room and use that regularly. (Next we’ll grind the corn we shelled into cornmeal.) In September I used our hand-cranked strainer to make 115 quarts of tomato sauce and this month, 30 quarts of applesauce for canning. We have a bike-powered electrical generator that charges a battery pack, which we use to power LED lights or laptops. (At times I wrote the book on my laptop after charging its battery with human power. This didn’t prove practical for 10-12 hours per day of writing, though.) We have other human-powered devices, like pedal-powered and hand-cranked blenders, a treadle sewing machine, a hand-cranked flashlight and a treadle pump, but don’t find many occasions to use them. (The pedal-powered cement mixer that got us started down this path was long ago decommissioned.) We have so many more ideas for inventions we’d like to try making, if only we could find the time.
SP: What’s the response to the book been like?
TD: So far responses to the book have been uniformly positive. Those are all from reviewers of advance copies. The book is just hitting the shelves now, so the wider response remains to be seen.
SP: What was the most enjoyable part of writing the book for you and why?
TD: By far the most enjoyable part of the book was interviewing all the human-power inventors (some of whom, unfortunately, didn’t make it into the book). I was amazed by the generosity of these people who shared their stories of discovery, technical details, and photos with a stranger. Their enthusiasm for human power was remarkable. Writing the book became a journey during which I kept meeting more fascinating characters. I nearly became an interview addict. Just when I thought I’d finished interviewing and really should start writing, I would find one more person to talk to—just one more person, then I promised, I’d quit.
SP: Did you build all the items in the plans yourself, or did others help?
TD: I built all the plans, often with help from my partner David. Also, before or during making these devices and writing the plans I received help in the form of consultation from people who’d made similar devices.
SP: Was there anything that you tried to build that just didn’t work or led to a lot of frustration? What was the hardest piece of machinery to build of those that made it into the book?
TD: Oh yes. I knew that an easily human-powered machine, and something I wanted in my home office, was a hand-cranked paper shredder. (I found only one commercially available model. I bought it and planned to review it for the book, but it was so cheaply built I didn’t bother.) I did devise a mostly functional homemade prototype, but it required grinding hundreds of large fender washers into razor-edged discs—and that was just Step 1. Still, I didn’t mind the tedium, and I was excited about the invention. But when I mentioned the grinding process to friends each said, bluntly, “No way. I wouldn’t do that.” It took me a while to let go of the homemade, hand-cranked paper shredder.
SP: What was something that you uncovered while researching the history of human-powered devices that you didn’t expect?
TD: What surprised me the most was how long it took humans to harness muscle power effectively. As far as historians can determine we didn’t invent a primitive crank until around 850 BC. And then we didn’t recognize its potential. It doesn’t show up again until the 12th century, and then only in the context of hurdy-gurdies. Finally in the 1400s a compound crank—the kind we would recognize from a bicycle’s crankset, for example, and what underlies almost every invention in this book—appears in an illustration. Historians find it puzzling that we let this amazing idea, which converts the reciprocal motion of our muscles into rotary motion, languish for so long.
SP: One thing that struck me while reading the book is how futile larger-scale electrical generation by human-powered means seems, but there are several small-scale products that make sense. What do you think the future is for manual electrical generation?
TD: Right. One of the best uses for human-powered electricity generation in the U.S. might be to teach us energy conservation! Pedaling to light an incandescent bulb shows us, viscerally, how much energy it takes to generate 60 watts and therefore, how valuable electricity really is and how little we pay for it. Maybe after realizing that we’d be more likely to turn off the light when we leave a room—or change our bulbs to compact fluorescent or LED.
If you’ve decided to human-power some devices in your home, like blenders or mills, bear in mind that mechanical devices, rather than electrical devices, allow you to apply more of your muscle power to the task. Converting human power to electricity is less efficient.
Still, human power is practical for electricity generation in a few circumstances: in remote locations, with low-power electronics, or when portability is necessary. Advances in electronics manufacturing mean that devices like music players or laptops require dramatically fewer watts than they used to, and so they’re more easily human-powered. Also, advances in battery efficiency and the quality of ultracapacitors means that we can store more of the power we generate or store and release it more conveniently. One challenge is that many of the commercially available human-powered devices—for example, most small cell-phone chargers—are cheaply made and poorly designed. They don’t capture energy efficiently. They’re uncomfortable for use for more than a few minutes. When researchers commit time and money to developing a human-powered electrical generator, they come up with something much better. For example, the hand-cranked electrical generator designed by High Tide Labs for the US military is equipped with electronic voltage regulation and options for varying strength levels. This level of sophistication isn’t available yet in most consumer products. The Eco Media Player, a hand-cranked video and audio player from Trevor Baylis Brands, is one exception, a consumer product that benefits from serious research and design efforts.
SP: Have you ever been to one of the human-powered concerts like those you mention in the book? How loud was it?
TD: I haven’t been to one, though I hope to go some day.
SP: There are a lot of idiosyncratic people in the pages of your book. Did you run into many people who were very guarded about the products they were developing, or were most folks pretty open about what they’re doing?
TD: Everyone I interviewed seemed thrilled to talk at length about their work. Some of the in-person interviews lasted a half day. Phone interviews went on for hours. That’s how passionate these inventors were about their interests. In a few cases, when a project was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, for example, a contact would refrain from giving me the status or all the technical details about an invention. Otherwise, everyone was very open.
I have an advance copy of The Human-Powered Home that I’m going to leave at The Bike Project to peruse for anyone who’s interested.