For almost every electronic device or oil driven machine there used to be a low-tech alternative that was powered by human muscles, water or wind.
Imagine you put a portable hard disk of 500 gigabytes in your backpack and start walking. In which cases are you faster than your internet connection?
The gipsy zeppelin baseship of Lieven Standaert generates its own energy, never has to land, and is equipped with a sun terrace where you can have a coffee.
At the end of the 19th century, many towns and cities were lit up by powerful electrical lamps placed on towers up to 300 feet (90 metres) high.
How can you blame people for flying if there is no affordable alternative?
Oven stoves are greener, more efficient, healthier, safer and cosier than all modern heating systems. Why are they gone and how do we get them back?
Artificial floating islands can be used to clean urban bodies of water. Any polluted canal, river, estuary, lake in a city park, or storm water retention pond would benefit from a floating island.
The craftsmanship associated with timbrel vaulting has long vanished, but the achievements are still with us today.
LEDs introduce lighting in places and situations where there was no lighting before.
If we cut the average speed of all vehicles by half, fuel consumption would decrease by a whopping 75 percent.
A small windmill on your roof or in the garden is an attractive idea. Unfortunately, commercially available micro wind turbines deliver hardly enough energy to power a light bulb. Their financial payback time is much longer than their life expectancy and in urban areas they will not even deliver as much energy as was needed to produce them.
Narcís Monturiol successfully resolved the two basic obstacles presented to submarine inventors: air supply and mechanical power.