If you have ever been to a seaport it is a busy place with heavy cranes and material handling equipment everywhere. Containers lined up sometimes 6-8 high, it is a scary place for some but for a material handling equipment supply and services company it is a dream come true. The seaports only job is to move freight to and from our shores. America exports all kinds of goods and imports every thing from car parts to computers.
Those containers represent World Trade, US trade deficit and the hopeful economies of many third world nations busy trying to fulfill the needs of our economic powerhouse and strong middle class base. This is why a material handling equipment and supply services company salesman is in heaven near such waters. But on my last visit I spent some time in a coffee shop with a container specialist who later switched jobs and became a material handling equipment supply guy. He told me he sold everything you could ever think of that was used in any part of the shipping business, from plastic wrap machines for small business to shock mats for the inside of trucks and cargo containers to protect the cargo, freight and exported goods to foreign shores.
I asked him about lighting and he said yes our company has manufactured lines on that too, he then asked me; “How many lights do you need and when do you want them?” What a salesmen, so since I was not actually buying lights, I bought him a cup of coffee to pick his brain. I asked him how do they light up such large Seaports and do you have an energy efficient lighting that uses no power source? He said; “Oh, we have all types of energy efficient bright lights that can light up a stadium, how many do you need?” I enjoyed his assertive “trial close” sales tactics, he must have went to Ziggy Ziglar’s Sales Seminars? Not bad I thought for a material handling equipment and supply specialist and consultant, who would have thought? As we talked it was apparent that no one uses solar panels to light up the seaports, they do not use wind, they bite the bullet and work of the power grid. He had no system that does not “plug in” in the way of lighting. They don’t exist.
I therefore propose using all the vibrational energy from the cranes, clanking of containers, forklifts, ship motors and material handling equipment to power up the lights at the modern seaport. How so you ask? Well, let me tell you what I told the material handling supply and equipment consultant. You see, by placing large sandwich sheets around the port where you want the light, which are specially designed with a taunt film on the vibrational side and small copper lined tubes, hundreds of them running perpendicular to the sheets, with magnets inside bouncing back and forth. These magnets will charge a capacitor and be hooked up to an LED lighting system using fiber optics or reflectors, each one hooked up to a .2 to .5 watt light. With hundreds of thousands of lights hooked up in a composite format it will light up the roadways and seaport storage yards and since the lights can shine down on the yards marked roads it would be like daylight without the light pollution associated with street lights in large ports, yet the same or better light for those working. We must have proper lighting at our seaports for security in case the power goes out.
Currently this technology is being used in those little flashlights you see advertised on television that you shake and they light, but you never need batteries. This idea of lighting up the Seaports is using that technology on a larger scale with miniaturized parts making up the guts between the sandwich sheets. Let there be light, through vibrational energy and there was, the whole seaport lit up like a Christmas Tree. Think on it.