I’d had the idea for a long time, perhaps ten
years or more. It started out as almost a philosophical theory and then
gradually morphed into a mechanical representation of that idea. It went something
like this.
You are
sitting in your favourite chair reading a really good book. You know the one,
the one you wished you had written but knew that you really weren’t capable of
producing. It is one of those late autumn dreamy afternoons where the evening
arrives earlier than you had expected. What happened to those long summer
evenings that seemed to go on late into the night when you were a child, at
home during those never ending, magical summer school holidays? It starts to
get dark. It becomes increasingly difficult to make out the print so what do
you do? You reach up and flick a light switch on and the problem is solved and
you carry on reading for as long as you wish, regardless of the sun’s desertion
to more southerly parts of the world.
Later,
when you have finished reading and there are other demands on your time, you
casually flick off the light switch and darkness returns to the room. Is it
just the lack of sunlight that makes it dark or is there an unseen dark star in
the sky that produces the darkness? Call it, perhaps, anti light in the same
way that physicists say that matter is balanced by anti matter and gravity is
balanced by anti gravity. Confucianists have thought this
way for millennia with the idea of everything in nature having a balance, as
exemplified by the concepts yin and yang.
Think
back, to picture yourself sitting in the chair. Perhaps it is earlier in the
afternoon and the sun is streaming through the windows making it unpleasantly
warm and too bright for your eyes as the sunlight reflects off the page into
your eyes, making you squint. You feel sleepy and decide to have a snooze but
it is too warm and bright.You have only one option, pull down a blind or draw a
curtain to screen you from the sun. Why can’t you lean over and flick on the
dark switch?
There
would be many benefits if you could. One would be that you would not need to
buy blinds or curtains. Another is that the dark, being antilight, would cancel
out the light, and therefore the electricity used to produce it. This would
mean that as your use of dark during the summer increased, it would cancel out
the cost of the light that you used during the winter. You would become truly
carbon neutral – for light and dark anyway – I’ll come to the rest of it later,
maybe.
I spent
another five years working out the technology to generate, distribute and
control this new dark energy. It was a lot easier than I thought as it was
possible to use the National Grid to distribute the dark energy from the
production sites, which were of course the same power stations that produced
the electricity for converting into light. All it needed was a small
modification at the power stations to produce the dark energy from the waste
heat. Coal fired power stations are only about 33% efficient so there is plenty
of waste heat to use.
It was
easy to use the existing grid to carry the dark energy in the same way as you
can download an e mail while carrying on a conversation on Skype, using the
same broadband connection, at the same time. I never have understood why the
two don’t get mixed up and you end up talking to your e mail account – I am
just happy that it works.
I now
had the idea and the system designed,. All I needed now were backers and
customers. I decided to go on television and pitch to some millionaires on one
of those animal alliteration shows; Sheep’s Shed, Pig’s Pen, Horse’s House or
some such. There are many of them these days on television. My pitch went very
well, Duncan and Theo started fighting over their bids as soon as they saw the
full potential but it was Peter Meaden who came up with the best offer. I
grabbed it and the rest is history, as they say.
That is
why there is a three way switch in every room in your house that gives you the
choice of how light or dark you want the room.
What
next, you ask. Well, light switches sometimes have dimmers so I have developed
a brighter system for the dark switches. It is now in production and will be
launched early next year. I am now looking at heating and cooling systems and
perhaps a secondary application of domestic water heating and refrigeration.
I had a
passing thought the other day about gravity. I was reading about Isaac Newton’s
trinary mathematics system and I wondered if…
