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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/feb/05/electric-monaros-and-hotted-up-skateboards-the-genius-who-wants-to-electrify-our-world>
"It is late morning at the home of inventor, entrepreneur and CEO, Saul
Griffith, in the coastal village of Austinmer, south of Sydney, and the scene
is instantly familiar.
Beach towels and children’s shoes are strewn by the front door; rogue socks and
pieces of Lego line the stairwell; breakfast dishes are stacked on the sink:
all signs of a household still in the throes of making the lurching transition
from the languor of summer holidays to the routines of school term time – right
down to the jar of negative rapid antigen Covid tests on the counter. Griffith
and his wife, Arwen, apologise: in the morning hubbub – two children off to
school, one starting high school – they momentarily forgot I was coming.
The only clue that this is the home of one of this generation’s most brilliant
inventors – in 2007 Griffith, who has a masters in engineering from the
University of Sydney and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, known in the Unites States as a “genius
grant” – is on the table tennis table, where what looks to be a skateboard
hotted-up with an electric motor, sits partially assembled.
“I’m messing around, I have voided the warranty on a whole bunch of electronics
on that table tennis table,” Griffith confesses. “It won’t be legal anywhere in
the world to use that skateboard.”
Nowadays, any “physical tinkering” Griffith does is “more for therapy” than
anything else. Having founded numerous successful clean-tech companies in the
US, where he’s lived for the past two decades, and still supervising his office
in San Francisco – overseeing a team of 50 people working on commercialising
clean technology products – he’s recently shifted the bulk of his professional
life towards advocating another approach to the climate crisis."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
