Tellurex

Tellurex World Pot™

Remote Village — Dead Cell Phone — Need Help Now
If You Can Start A Fire, Now You Can Place A Call

“I hope you will bring this invention to my country first.” Two minutes after starting a campfire, Godfrey Ssimbwa from Uganda charges a dead cell phone using the Tellurex World Pot™ as Tellurex Director of Engineering Richard Harmon explains its design. The Tellurex device will be demonstrated at the Design for the Other 90% event at RedLine in Denver, Colorado July 8 – September 25, 2011. Watch the video.


Denver, Colorado, July 8, 2011 — Tellurex Corporation today unveiled a practical solution that combines native cooking fires and thermoelectric science to recharge cell phones and other portable electrical devices in remote villages and huts around the world. The Tellurex World Pot™ is one of more than thirty innovative products that are featured in Design for the Other 90%, a Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum exhibition on display at RedLine in Denver, Colorado today through September 25.

The company conducted a live demonstration at the RedLine exhibit using a fully discharged cell phone and a common teakettle with an implanted high performance Tellurex thermoelectric module and a USB port. After less than two minutes atop a modest fire, the common teakettle had become an electric generator, enabling a Tellurex engineer to boot up the dead phone and place a call to a spectator, who was chosen at random. Meanwhile, the teakettle-generator also began to boil and sterilize water.


In this form, when placed atop a simple campfire the Tellurex World Pot easily produces enough electricity to power a cell phone with a dead battery in an emergency, charge its battery or illuminate a hut with LED lights. The bigger the pot, the more power a Tellurex World Pot can provide. The Tellurex World Pot is a trademark of Tellurex Corporation. Watch the video.


The Tellurex World Pot can deliver important benefits to native people in the underdeveloped world who may benefit from far-reaching cellular coverage but are too often ambushed and robbed while trekking to distant charging stations for their phones. It may also be a life saver in any location hit by a natural disaster and power loss, where rescue may depend on keeping cell phone GPS and texting power working over several days, along with any mapping and compass apps.

“We’ve connected the past to the future and made it work,” said Tellurex Chairman Clyde McKenzie. “Using a simple teakettle as a portable generator, we’ve created power for global communications from the kind of cooking fire that mankind has used for at least 250,000 years.”


“Stella” – Marystella Rugundiza Astor from Tanzania: “In my country, 98% of people, they have cell phone, but they have no way to charge them. That’s very cool.” Godfrey Ssimbwa from Uganda: “Everyone depends on tea, depends on coffee. People boil water to drink in the morning, in the evening. This is how the kids boil their milk, too.” Watch the video.


The Tellurex World Pot concept can be adapted to any of a variety of traditional metal cooking implements used across the underdeveloped world. Better yet, it can be manufactured in each country of use, creating new jobs where today people are surviving on less than one dollar a day with little opportunity to earn more.

Among the benefits of the Tellurex World Pot sitting atop a simple fire:

  • 1 portable unit: will charge a cell phone or rechargeable batteries, or light up high intensity LED lights anywhere a fire can be built.
  • 2 minutes: will power up a cell phone with a dead battery, send a text and transmit a GPS location.
  • 36 minutes: can help sterilize 1 liter of water for drinking while 4 potatoes are baked in the coals of a campfire and a cell phone achieves a 20% charge.
  • Light a dark hut: Alternatively, treating just 1 liter of water will trickle charge reusable batteries to power 4 high intensity LED lights for over 4 hours.
  • Hike to safety: sterilizing 6 liters of water will fully charge a cell phone over 3.5 hours and provide an individual at risk a day-and-a-half of sterilized water that would be important to survive a natural disaster or hike to safety.
  • Charge the village phones: imagine each fire in a 12-home village sterilizing 12 liters of water to comfortably sustain 36 people and fully charge twenty-four cell phones without the threat of losing a loved one to bandits on the trails.

If it’s a metal cooking vessel, Tellurex can integrate its thermoelectric power generating design. Based on testing against competitors, Tellurex sells the world’s best thermoelectric module. Watch the video.


Positioning itself as the global leader in new thermoelectric materials, engineering and technology, Tellurex Corporation uses the tagline: “Solutions for a World At Risk.” The Michigan company provides thermal management and power generation engineering and design expertise to the medical and bio-medical markets and to industrial customers in automotive, diesel truck, electric generators, thermally managed circuitry enclosures, and telecom industries, as well as to the US military.

Heating and cooling cup holders—another Tellurex invention—are featured as standard equipment in the Cadillac Escalade Platinum Edition SUV. In 2011, the company will introduce its technology to home appliance and retail product markets in Australia, Korea and the United States. Search Google for “self-powered deploy-and-forget wireless sensors” and you will find Tellurex dominating Page One since an announcement at last year’s Sensors Expo trade show. And this month Michigan State University, with which Tellurex collaborates on materials research, will host the 30th International Conference on Thermoelectrics near Tellurex headquarters in Traverse City, Michigan.

“We’ve achieved our engineering objective for this project and continuous improvement is underway. We’re searching out collaborations that may help us create the mass production that will be needed to distribute this elegant solution around the world by making the Tellurex World Pot affordable to a world that desperately needs it,” McKenzie explained.


Godfrey Ssimbwa from Uganda: “The main reason why people have cell phones is for emergencies… and to look for jobs.” Watch the video.


The Other 90 Percent

Billions of earth’s inhabitants dwell in areas and circumstances where everyday electricity cannot be part of their lives. However, thanks to the rapid adoption of cellular networks across the hinterlands and the embrace of cell phones by native peoples, modern wireless communication links remote villages and isolated homes to one another and the industrial world…

… as long as the cell phone battery remains charged.

Today, danger lurks in the third world when it is necessary to recharge the cell phones of remote villages. It is often the custom that one villager gathers up all of his family’s and neighbors’ phones and packs them several miles to an urban recharging station. All too frequently, this person is attacked and injured or killed by bandits seeking to steal the phones.

A trickle charge for cell phones from a simple pot over a cooking fire would be a major advance in village security and quality of life. But how is this possible?


Godfrey Ssimbwa from Uganda: “This can save many lives.” Even a small fire can power up a cell phone with a dead battery. Watch the video.


“We have overcome the challenge of impedance to produce a reliable electrical output from even a small fire,” explained Richard Harmon, Director of Engineering for Tellurex, who designed the Tellurex World Pot and demonstrated it at RedLine.

“If your battery is dead, I can give you the power in the bush to make a phone call with nothing more than a few twigs and a liter of water,” Harmon explained.


Capital and Art Converge

As the site to launch another Tellurex innovation, Denver’s RedLine is a diverse urban laboratory where art, education and community converge. RedLine’s vision is to foster forms of social practice in the arts that inspire inquiry and catalyze change. “RedLine is an important cultural catalyst,” explained the Tellurex chairman. “With its encouragement of and commitment to this kind of exhibit, it self-identifies and emerges as a place in the world where circuits of capital and social consciousness meet and new things can happen,” McKenzie said.

Design for the Other 90% is a Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum exhibition that is currently on display at RedLine. This traveling exhibition showcases product designs that use both conventional and unorthodox methods, new and traditional materials, and ancient and innovative technologies to solve myriad problems—from cleaner-burning sugarcane charcoal to a solar-rechargeable battery for a hearing aid; from a portable instant water-purification straw to a $100 laptop. By understanding the available resources and tools as well as the lives and needs of their potential users, the world’s innovative product designers create simple, pragmatic objects and ingenious, adaptive systems that can help transform lives and communities.

“Tellurex is proud to contribute its research and design advances to this very important work,” McKenzie said. “Our company’s mission statement affirmatively states that the betterment of mankind is one focus of our objectives.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION, email Sales@Tellurex.com.