Ah, the Gravity Lamp. This wonderful green innovation was conceived and apparently "built" buy a Virginia Tech student. This is really a crowning achievement of human engineering because not only does this lamp produce bright diffuse light from its high power LEDs, it also defies the laws of physics!
This lamp apparently is powered by potential energy, or the energy stored in things that are high up. To light this lamp, the user has to move the weight up to the top and then as the weight falls, the lamp will use the energy to light up. This isn't a new concept. This is actually how grandfather clocks are powered.
The problem is that assuming the counterweight for this thing weighs 200 pounds and the lamp is about 6 feet high, it could power the 10 super efficient LEDs (drawing about .1 watt) for about 1800 seconds or about 30 minutes. This guy claims that it will run for 4 hours.
Wow! That really is something. I can't believe he got something like that to actually work-- Oh wait, what's that? It's just a picture? Oh... Never mind.
