The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

During the famine, most students stopped going to school, but the arrival of dowe and pumpkins means that the village has enough energy to resume classes. Sadly, William still cannot afford the school fees and spends his days playing games in the trading center instead of in class. Missing the mental stimulation, William decides to go to the small library at the Wimbe primary school stocked with American books.

The librarian, Mrs. Edith Sikelo, greets William at the library and explains the rules for borrowing books. William is pleasantly surprised to find that the library houses more than just primary readers. Despite the variety of books, William checks the textbooks that his classmates are studying in school in the hopes that he can independently catch up before classes start next year. He goes to the library each morning and studies under the blue gum tree in his yard all afternoon. Gilbert helps William stay on track by loaning William his notes each day, but William still struggles because the English books are difficult for him to understand on his own.

One Saturday, Gilbert and William meet at the library. William finds a science textbook with diagrams and pictures that he finds very easy to understand. One of these diagrams explains how hydro plants, such as the one on the Shire River in southern Malawi, use water to produce electricity. William compares this to a bicycle dynamo and beings to wonder how he could set up a machine that would generate electricity for his family. Another book, Explaining Physics, illustrates scientific concepts that William has wondered about for years. William checks out both books and begins working his way through the complicated English explanations.

William continues to read Explaining Physics, finding a chapter on magnets and electromagnets. William already knew that magnets have opposing sides that attract or repel each other, but uses the book to learn how to make his own magnets using the earth’s magnetic field, electricity, and a nail. Magnets can also create electricity, when a coil of wire spins in a magnetic field. This is called alternating current, as opposed to the direct current in most batteries. Bicycle dynamos are one of the best examples of an alternating current, with the rider providing the spinning motion. William keeps Explaining Physics for a month and reads it instead of continuing his independent school study.

When the school term ends, Gilbert and William go back to the library looking for something fun to read. William stumbles across an American textbook called Using Energy, a book that will change his life. On the cover are windmills, though William doesn’t even know what a windmill is at this point. The book explains how energy is found all around us, and just needs to be converted into the proper form in order to be used. Windmills can harness the motion and energy of the wind to create electricity. William understands how the wind could provide the necessary force to generate electricity just like in a bicycle dynamo, but without the effort of a bicycle rider.

William begins to dream of all the things a windmill could do for him and his family, including creating electric light to replace kerosene lamps and a rotating pump to irrigate and water the fields. A good pump would allow the Kamkwambas to harvest twice a year – a tantalizing prospect after the horror of the famine. A windmill promises William release from the darkness and hunger that has marked the past year of his life, and the freedom to go to school instead of working the farm. Armed with the knowledge that someone built a windmill for the picture in this textbook, William imagines that he too can build a windmill.

William experiments with small prototypes before tackling a giant windmill. He starts to gather materials for blades, a shaft, and a rotor as well as looking for wires and a dynamo to generate electricity from the movement of the blades. He splits an old plastic perfume bottle into blades, then adds PVC pipe extenders. William creates a makeshift drill out of a nail and a maize cob to bore holes in the PVC pipe and wire it to the blades. Agnes catches William heating his drill on her cook fire and tells William to stop messing with toys and help his father in the field. William cannot yet explain that this “toy” will eventually be much more help to farmers.

Now William needs a dynamo, but he has no money to buy the shiny bicycle dynamo he has seen in the windows of Daud’s shop at the trading center. He considers earning the five hundred kwacha through ganyu, then realizes that this prototype windmill could actually use a smaller generator such as a radio-cassette player motor. William goes to Geoffrey’s house and explains why he needs a radio motor. Geoffrey is eager to help, though he had originally though William’s constant trips to the library were boring and useless.

William and Geoffrey extract the radio motor and attach it to William’s blade contraption. They hunt through the garbage to find a woman’s shoe and use a piece of rubber from the sole to make sure that the motor’s wheel and the blades have enough friction to catch together when the blades move. Geoffrey spins the blades by hand and William tests the current by pressing the motor’s wires to his tongue. Their prototype works. They then test the prototype by wiring their windmill to Geoffrey’s radio. When the wind blows, the radio produces music!

Moving on from this small success, William dreams bigger. Working from the same model of his prototype, William plans out the pieces he will need for a full size windmill. For the next month, William hunts through the abandoned scrap yard of a large tobacco estate near Kachokolo school. William and Gilbert had often played there, but William now sees the wealth of materials the scrap yard holds for his plan.

The first afternoon, William finds a tractor fan that will be perfect for the windmill’s rotor and a tractor piston he can use for the shaft. Three days later, he finds a ball bearing to reduce friction in the windmill, and painstakingly pops the bearing out of an old nut-grinding machine while pretending to be his childhood hero Bolo in order to ignore the pain in his hands. As he works, William looks across to the grounds of Kachokolo school and hopes that the tobacco crop will earn enough money for his family to pay the school fees and allow him to return to class when the new term starts.