Far be it from me to spread my Spam to others, but today’s email was quite humorous. OK, its up there with the Nigerian Scam Artist who wants me to send him money to release all his governments frozen funds.
Designed without batteries, it has a magnet in a tube surrounded by copper coiled wire. Shaking the flashlight runs the magnet back and forth through the tube, which negatively charges the copper coil and powers the bulb through a capacitor.
Evidently, if you shake it and it will give you 5 minutes of flashlight life.
Now there’s just one problem: on that site, there’s a graphic of what charging the flashlight will look like. Now maybe I’m wrong, but a guy could get beat up going around the woods shaking a flashlight like this:
Hey, I was “shaking my flashlight” just last night…
Seriously though, with my limited knowledge electrical matters, it sounds like this would work. Is there a technical reason this wouldn’t work, or was it just the pic that you found funny?
Hammacher Schlemmer sells something like this, its really fun. You don’t have to beat it up like the picture shows, just tip it back and forth for a bit so that the magnet swings through the wire coil and charges the capacitor.
I don’t see how you can even remotely relate this to the Nigerian scam. It’s a real item, it actually works, my dad owns one, I believe we got it from a Marshall Fields catalog. Either ours holds a charge longer or they’re just underestimating, cuz you don’t really need to shake it for quite as long as 30 seconds to get 5 minutes of light. Also, not only does it not have batteries, it doesn’t have a lightbulb. It’s an LED instead, gives very clean blue-white light. It’s a really good product, actually.
Must everything be about sex? ::sigh:: Sometimes a flashlight is just a flashlight.
