← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · madrussian
Thread ID: 19753 | Posts: 19 | Started: 2005-08-20
2005-08-20 17:43 | User Profile
Niggers are conspicuously absent from science and engineering. However, they send search parties to Africa to find and report about one (or two, or a dozen):
[url]http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/aug05/0805ahac.html[/url]
The African Hacker
With home-brewed code and a little help from Microsoft, a programmer in Ghana launches Africa's first software empire
By G. Pascal Zachary
Photography by Eric Don-Arthur
The first time I meet Hermann Chinery-Hesse, he is pouring diesel fuel from a plastic jug into an electric generator. I am in the West African country of Ghana, visiting his software company, Soft Tribe Ltd.
0805ahac01.jpg Chinery-Hesse is chief of the Tribe. He's made a small fortune writing software, working as a systems architect, and selling computer code to hundreds of businesses in his country of 21 million people. He drives a Mercedes. He wears imported Birkenstock sandals. He hails from a prominent family, was born in Dublin, and went to college in the United States. He could be working anywhere on the strength of his Irish passport, yet he's spent the past dozen years in Accra, Ghana's coastal capital and one-time slave-trade hub.
This steamy December morning, with deadlines looming, his electricity is out, his programmers are idle, and he's feeding fuel to a balky 50-kilovolt-ampere generatorââ¬âone of the three he keeps at the ready.
Having emptied his container and thus delivered power to his 18 programmersââ¬âabout one-tenth of all full-time code writers in Ghanaââ¬âChinery-Hesse relaxes and, for the first time, acknowledges my presence. Stroking his beard, he quips, "If we Africans are to develop, we must want to get our hands dirty."
Chinery-Hesse thinks a lot about how Africans can better their lives. And he's not alone in his conviction that his people can thrive by harnessing innovations in computing, electronics, and telecommunications. "Technology," he declares, "is on our side."
What sets him apart, other than a knack for adapting code to Africa's distinctive conditions, is his willingness to embody his beliefs in a business enterprise. With 65 employees, his company, popularly known as "Soft," is a testimony to the idea that information technology can be a great equalizer for his people.
The company's softwareââ¬âwritten in C++, Visual Basic, and even the ancient Clipper development language for DOSââ¬âis everywhere in Accra. Chinery-Hesse, now 41 years old, started out pursuing a "shotgun business strategy," as he puts it, offering between 15 and 30 programs at any given time, including his best seller, a payroll program called Akatua. In contrast, mighty Adobe Systems Inc., in San Jose, Calif., with nearly 4000 employees, offers about 45 software products. With Soft's abundance of offerings, the company has grown at an impressive clip over the past decade, doubling in revenue and staff year after year.
Old, cheap PCs are the backbone of African offices and increasingly popular cybercafés, where ordinary sub-Saharan Africans, most of whom subsist on less than US $1 per day, access the Internet. The people of Ghana, particularly those in Accra, a sprawling city of 2 million, are a little better off than their sub-Saharan neighbors, earning on average about $2 per day in an economy based primarily on exports of gold, timber, and cocoa.
Slightly smaller in area than the state of Oregon and sandwiched between Togo and Ivory Coast on the Atlantic Ocean, Ghana won independence from Britain in 1957, the first black African nation to do so. In 1992, following a series of military coups and dictatorships, Ghana adopted a new constitution that provided for a democratic political system. Lt. Jerry Rawlings, who had ruled the country as a dictator from 1981 to 1992 won the first two elections in 1992 and 1996. Rawlings peacefully transferred power to the current president, John Kufuor, in 2000.
Political power struggles, civil war, corruption, disease, and wasted potential usually spring to mind when the subject is Africa. But I know a different Africa, from many visits in recent years, and my different Africa springs in part from my contact with Chinery-Hesse. Much of his success reflects his shrewd realization that Africans can't simply import American or European software programs but need to tailor them to their own surroundings.
Chinery-Hesse's ability to build a thriving software business in an economic climate where the need for information technology is just beginning to grow has tested his ingenuity and made him a celebrity in Ghana [see photo, "Making a Splash"]. While hardly in the global technical vanguard, Chinery-Hesse is counted as one of "a handful of the most important software developers in Africa," says Eric Osiakwan, an IT specialist in Accra who consults for the World Bank. "Hermann is our Bill Gates, and Soft is our national software champion."
Chinery-Hesse is thus a valuable role model. "Many young code writers get their start at Soft, learn the ropes, and then hone their skills," says Guido Sohneââ¬âhimself an example of Chinery-Hesse's influence: a former employee of Soft, he now runs his own business as an independent programmer in Ghana. "To us, at least, Hermann is a savior," Sohne says.
"Saviors" are common in Africa, and they usually come in the form of demagogues or rebel leaders, missionaries or medical doctors, peacekeepers or refugee-camp managers. Rarely are they Birkenstock-wearing engineers or software programmers. That's why Chinery-Hesse is worth getting to know. Because if Africa has a sunny future, Chinery-Hesse will be a part of it. He is emblematic of the little-known world of African code writers, hackers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who have chosen to live and work in their homelands, persevering against great odds and on the margins of global technological change.
These people, often self-taught and sometimes surprisingly well paid, are the beneficiaries of the accelerating spread of the Internet, the increasing power of cheap computers, and the burgeoning global community of programmers. The African hackers are quiet heroes, however, because they embody a side of the region that is entirely missed by the world's media: they represent an Africa where blacks are using their brains to try to build a better future against a backdrop of spotty electricity, unfettered piracy, inferior computers, and mediocre universities.
Nowadays, Soft is focusing on document management software for government agencies and large multinationals doing business in Ghana. It also supplies accounting software for small and medium-size businesses, such as stores and restaurants. Its cash register program, for instance, tallies the bill at Accra's largest grocery store. And one of the most popular dining spots in Accra, Frankie's Hotel and Restaurant, uses Soft's code to manage inventory, process payroll, and pay taxes [see photo, "Would You Like Code With That?"]. Hotels, gold-mining companies, and Internet cafés do, too. Even a few cocoa plantations calculate their piecework pay with Soft's code.
Here's why Soft's programs are essential: programs from the United States and Europe are usually too expensive and require lots of memory and the latest machines. By contrast, those that Soft offers are small enough to work with the Intel 486- and even 386-based PCs that are readily available in Ghana for as little as $100.
CHINERY-HESSE CALLS HIS AFRICANIZED CODE "tropically tolerant." Besides being compact, his programs also write frequently to disk, reducing the chances of losing data if power is lost, as it often is. Because Internet connectivity remains relatively expensive, his programs also work offline as much as possible. And to combat the rampant piracy, beta versions of software rarely leave Soft's premises, finished products don't have an autoinstall function (you need a Soft technician to launch them), and batches of bug fixes are often delivered individually to customers rather than generally released.
Why doesn't Soft write everything in Linux, the open-source language available for little or no cost? It would seem a no-brainer for a software entrepreneur in a desperately poor region of the world. Not so, and the reasons show why Chinery-Hesse is no ordinary third-world software tycoon. Linux is simply impractical for his purposes. "It can't be used for serious business," he says, because it would be too easy for employees of a business to learn to useââ¬âand abuseââ¬âthe source code of essential programs.
"In Accra, an IT manager earns $100 a month," Chinery-Hesse explains. "He has access to all of a company's data, including backups. With open-source, he can learn to generate bogus reports. He'll delete charges and pay himself or others money." Besides, "if we went for open-source, we would be relegated to basically doing installation and training," he adds. "Do I want a country of software developers or a country of installers?"
Chinery-Hesse's answer can be deduced from watching him ride along one of Accra's traffic-clogged roads on a motorbike, a risky form of travel he undertakes because, as a driver in a hurry, he can more easily dodge potholes and lines of cars. The trip leaves him blanketed with dust from the harmattan, the winds that carry sand from the Sahara, thousands of miles away, into Accra.
His willingness to brave both the harmattan winds and Accra's notorious traffic jams underscores Chinery-Hesse's ambition. Despite the disadvantages of his country's geography and infrastructure, he wants Ghanaââ¬âand Africa generallyââ¬âto achieve a kind of greatness in software, an indigenous engineering success that has perpetually eluded Africans.
The challenge is both technical and social, because in Africa the business of writing code is tightly coupled with the economics of underdevelopment. Soft's local market is tiny by international standards, worth only millions of dollars annually, and the public appetite for innovations is limited. "The big problem in Ghana is that Soft can do really cool, complex stuff, but there's not a whole lot of people who want that stuff," says former Soft programmer Sohne. "They might need it, but they don't know they need it."
"Hermann is our Bill Gates, and Soft is our national software champion"
For instance, Sohne could design an automatic bill payment system for the electric company, whose customers must still go to an office to pay their bills. But because the company is a state-owned monopoly, it has no incentive to make payment more convenient.
The lack of daring among African IT customers forces code writers in the region to look elsewhere for ideas and energy. To expand the company's business both within and beyond Ghana's borders, this past April Chinery-Hesse struck a deal with Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., that for the first time has him selling software made by another company. He's agreed to peddle a suite of applications, called Navision, aimed at medium-size businesses. It coordinates a company's financials, supply chain, customer information, and Web-based transactions through a single database.
The deal gives Chinery-Hesse rights to the source code, so his programmers can produce add-on programs, including ones that manage payroll and microfinancial transactions, such as small loans to people too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. The agreement lets Soft sell its add-on softwareââ¬âand also allows Microsoft to market Soft's add-ons throughout the world. "We deliver the building blocks, and Soft brings local knowledge," says Microsoft's Andreas Peterson, a Navision product manager based in Nairobi, Kenya. "Hermann can take what we've done, customize it, and sell it internationally."
Microsoft has 1500 developers working on Navision worldwide but only a handful in tropical Africa, including those in Kenya as well as in Nigeria. "The recognition of Soft Tribe by Microsoft is a source of great pride to the whole country," the Ghanaian president, Kufuor, said at the announcement of the deal in April.
SOFTWARE VENDORS doing business in Africa constantly battle technological ignorance. Take Soft's latest large assignment, for example. It's a $200 000 contract to create a software program to manage all case documents for the government of Ghana's human rights commission, which investigates violations against individual citizens. When Chinery-Hesse bid on the contract, which is being funded by a Danish aid agency, he based his proposal on the belief that the rights commission had an existing computer network linking its dozen field offices to its headquarters in the capital. Only after Soft won the contract did Chinery-Hesse realize that there was no such network.
Such misunderstandings happen often. Sometimes, Soft misjudges the client's capacities, but this time the client misjudged its own needs. Because all of the rights documents are currently done on paper, there wasn't anyone at the commission who knew enough about computing to realize that the commission needed not only a program for creating and managing documents but also a network for sharing them. Says Chinery-Hesse, "Customers often can't see the difference between a program and a network."
So Soft is building both, applying the tropically tolerant mind-set to the design. This being Ghana, a country whose fully democratic government is only five years old, Chinery-Hesse is designing a Microsoft Windows program that will safeguard rights information in the event of, say, a military coup or a physical attack on the commission's offices. Relying on a "store and forward" technique, Soft's program calls for every case file to be stored in a central server, most likely to be located in London.
Nor will the program depend on constant Web access. Instead, it will store files locally on a computer, shipping them across the network automatically whenever a connection is made. "This way, if the Web connection goes down, as it surely will, work continues," Chinery-Hesse explains. In the same way, if the computers in a commission office are stolen or broken, the server can send copies of the office's entire files as soon as the computers are replaced.
Understanding local conditions and designing software to suit them are what Chinery-Hesse does best. Consider his experience with Internet cafés. In Ghana, as in most of the developing world, Internet service remains expensive. Because there are very few landlines, dial-up service from the home or office is virtually nonexistent. The next best option, a very-small-aperture terminal satellite (VSAT) connection, starts at about $5000 for the dish antenna, modem, router, and cabling, prohibitively expensive for the average Ghanaian.
So most people pay $1 per hour to connect to the Web from one of the hundreds of cafés outfitted with satellite dishes and low-end PCs that have sprung up in the country over just the last five years. Each café needs software to manage its operations and, most important, to clock the time a customer spends surfing the Web. Losing track of time means losing money. Because the large U.S. and European software companies don't specialize in such software, Chinery-Hesse seized the opportunity to satisfy a large local need.
What happened next, however, reveals the vagaries of writing software in one of the world's poorest places. Chinery-Hesse won a contract with the largest Web café in Ghana to develop a basic program, called Lumumbashi (after a town in the Democratic Republic of Congo). Lumumbashi's chief feature was to track usage while preventing wrongdoers from turning off the feature and surfing for free.
Whenever possible, Chinery-Hesse takes his custom-made programs and converts them into generic ones for other jobs. Following this model, he developed a general piece of software for Web cafés based on Lumumbashi. Anticipating threats from software pirates, he sold test versions to a first batch of customers and then offered a $50 prize to users who crashed his system and could explain to him how they did it.
The feedback helped make Lumumbashi essentially immune to tampering. But Soft failed to sell many copies for a reason Chinery-Hesse never anticipated: there were so many pirated copies of other café programs that few managers needed to purchase Soft's.
BESIDES PROVIDING GHANA with tropically tolerant code, Soft is the premier training ground for the country's growing population of full-time programmers, who today number around 200. Their life isn't easy. On a humid January morning, Rudolf Akrong is one of seven male programmers crammed into a tiny windowless room. Ancient PCs line three walls; along the fourth, an administrator sits at a desk elevated on a small platform [see photo, "Soft's HQ"].
Akrong is scrambling to make a change in an accounting program used by Frankie's, which happens to be one of Soft's most important customers. Frankie's owner wants a new feature in its customer receipts, a line that separately lists the sales tax imposed on each transaction; currently only the total amount is given.
Chinery-Hesse asked for the change to be made in a single day, a demand Akrong is finding impossible to meet. He slept at the office last night on a small foam pad, and this morning, with the electricity out, he is working on his laptop while other programmers, who have only desktop PCs, lounge about, cursing and joking about the electric company and waiting for Chinery-Hesse to fire up the backup generator. The laptop displays a photo, in the background, of Akrong's girlfriend, who is attending the government university in Accra. By midmorning, Akrong still hasn't fixed the bug. He fears igniting Chinery-Hesse's wrath, but his concentration is interrupted by a friend's arrival.
The friend is showing off a new PDA from Dell Computer Corp., Round Rock, Texas. It's no small event: the chance to handle the latest electronic gear from the United States or Japan is rare. The programmers gather around, chatting excitedly in Twi, the local language. Akrong gamely tries to keep working, but after a half hour, he pushes away from his desk and presses his hands against the sides of his head. A colleague suggests lunch, and he agrees. The programmers pile into Akrong's 13-year-old Peugeot 405. Alone among the programmers, he owns a car, a bonus from Chinery-Hesse. Fortunately, it starts without a push (it doesn't always).
On the drive to a nearby restaurant, the programmers joke about girls, music, and the PDA. At the restaurant, they are treated with respect. Though they rank on the bottom rung of the software pecking order globally, in Ghana their salaries put them squarely in the middle class, and without families, they freely spend their cash.
The waitresses jump to attention on their arrival at the restaurant. The programmers order a special local dish called waakye, a hefty plate of rice and beans drenched in a spicy, oily sauce. As a side dish, a local bony fish, tilapia, is served. The feast costs $4 a person, a dear price in Ghana, but no sweat for programmers like Akrong. He earns about $400 a month at Softââ¬âabout five times as much as an experienced Ghanaian nurse earns and 10 times as much as a policeman earns.
Back at Soft's office, Akrong returns to his bug fix. He plays jazz on his laptop and soon dozes off. Sleeping in the office the night beforeââ¬âor maybe the heavy lunchââ¬âis catching up with him.
Akrong, 23, has worked at Soft for the past four years. After high school, he attended a one-year course on basic science, then was hired by Chinery-Hesse. Accra is home to the country's flagship public university, but Chinery-Hesse doesn't recruit its graduates, finding the university's computer science program woefully out of date.
Assembly languages from the 1960s are still taught religiously at the university, for instance, but courses on such contemporary languages as C++ are offered only sporadically. The computer science department's dozen working PCs are not generally connected to the Internet. Some students write their programming exercises with pencil and paper, while others work in Internet cafés.
The department has only three permanent faculty members to serve 400 students. The department chair, who has a master's degree, earns about $300 a month. Academic salaries are so low that students are advised to leave the classroom whenever their teacher is 10 minutes late; odds are the professor is consulting somewhere and won't show up at all.
Because of the spotty quality of formal computer training available in the country, Chinery-Hesse prefers to hire what he calls "uncorrupted" minds that he can mold. "Ghana's educational system is exceedingly theoretical and designed to train people to manage, say, a Mercedes dealership rather than to build a Mercedes," Chinery-Hesse says. "What we require is more practical education."
Chinery-Hesse offers such an education for those persistent enough to stick it out. Akrong, for instance, began as an unpaid intern. "Then, the simplest thing I couldn't handle," he says. "They were hard on me. There was a culture of certain people feeling superior, who sought to put you down. I got dissed."
The trial by fire was worth it. Today he is one of Soft's most important product tweakers and bug fixers. He writes applications for Windows programs in C++ and Visual Basic, and he even has a growing entourage of junior programmers who are learning at his knee. The day he finishes the code for the restaurant program, Chinery-Hesse tells him he'll be training a new Soft employee, whom he'll help choose. He is told to evaluate the C++ skills of the various candidates and to quiz them on their business know-how.
Training new staff is a constant at Soft, where programmer turnover is astonishingly high. Some can't hack the regimen, while others strike out on their own, seeking higher pay and more autonomy. Chinery-Hesse reserves his special pique for those who leave to seek programming jobs in the United States or Europe. "We should fix what we've got in Ghana," he says.
Akrong wants to remain in Ghana, but he realizes his code writing may suffer if he does. There are few places for him to study formally, so he learns on the fly. He tries to stay sharp by browsing the Web and rapping with his father, who years ago worked as a programmer at Soft. Chinery-Hesse offered to teach Akrong the ropes as a favor to his dad.
FAMILY TIES MEAN A LOT in Africa. Chinery-Hesse's mother was once the highest-ranking African woman in the United Nations system, rising to the post of deputy director of the International Labor Organization before retiring in 1999. His father, whose ancestors include a German colonist who bequeathed the Hesse name, is a lawyer who advises the government of Uganda. After spending his early years outside of Ghana, Chinery-Hesse attended high school in the country and then enrolled at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas, where he lived with a relative.
His experience in the United States transformed him. "I could suddenly see opportunities more clearly in Ghana after being in America," he says. Before his U.S. stretch, he dreamed of becoming a civil servant, following his mother's path, and he blames Ghana's educational system for such personal conservatism. "We aren't trained to be creative," he says. America taught him the value of improvisation, and that talent is "not a matter of qualifications but of skills." He also discovered an ability to bounce back from rejection. "America taught me to accept 'no' and to move on."
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in industrial technology, Chinery-Hesse moved to London, working for a couple of years in business before coming to Accra in a fit of idealism in 1990. The country, once one of Africa's richest, had seen its economy collapse under the stress of repeated military coups.
Unfazed, Chinery-Hesse quickly persuaded the leading travel agent in Accra to let him computerize his back office by creating a program to keep track of expenses paid and of clients who owed him money. Chinery-Hesse aced the job and then recruited a mate from secondary school, Joe Jackson, who brought important management skills and market knowledge to the venture.
"My parents' financial comfort allowed me to gamble," Chinery-Hesse says. His bet paid off. Ghana was starting to computerize, and even many of the country's largest businesses found importing European computer consultants to be too expensive. Chinery-Hesse positioned Soft to fill the void.
At first, locals who doubted his knowledge of computing dismissed Chinery-Hesse. But over time, he wore down his skeptics. Heineken, Nestlé, and Unileverââ¬âthree European brands with major operations in Ghanaââ¬âbecame large customers of business applications, choosing Soft for the same reasons local companies would: its programs were cheaper, they were more suited to the old computers in use in Ghana, and they were customized to local business conditions.
Success convinced Chinery-Hesse that "growing his own" code was essential to building both a business and a better society. But skepticism remains. Multinational corporations, while among his best customers, constantly question whether they should be buying African-made software even for use in Africa. Meanwhile, the few large, lucrative government software projects that come up are routinely shipped abroad, handled by expensive European or U.S. programmers.
Even so, Soft has inspired imitators in recent years. For example, a former Oracle manager, a native of Ghana, has launched a firm. So have other engineers educated in the United States. Talented programmers from other African countries also have trickled into Ghana, drawn by the country's tranquility, ease, and low cost of living. "We are all doing the same thing and chasing the same 10 customers," says Mauli Tse, a Ghanaian graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, who runs an IT business in Accra.
A few coding shops in Ghana are chasing outsourcing jobs from the developed world as well, but not Chinery-Hesse's. He prefers to pursue customers in neighboring African countries, where his philosophy of tropically tolerant code matches local conditions. Lately, Chinery-Hesse is reducing the number of products the company offers to focus on its strengths in accounting and document management software and to concentrate his programmers on making add-on products for Navision.
Chinery-Hesse and his backers know the Microsoft deal is Soft's chance to succeed internationally with a made-in-Ghana software program that piggybacks on Microsoft's marketing muscle. Committed to self-reliance, Chinery-Hesse thinks that his fellow Africans must accept that, while homegrown information technology may save them, the wider world won't. His dream remains "to expand software in Ghana, to make more money, and to show the world" that, despite the often depressing headlines about poverty and mayhem in Africa, "there are opportunities here for technical talent."
He has personally reaped the benefits from these opportunities. The question in his mind is: how many more Africans will, and how soon?
With additional reporting by Daniel Morris ** ABOUT THE AUTHOR G. Pascal Zachary is the author of The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy (2003). His research on information technology in Africa was supported in part by the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, in Tempe.**
2005-08-20 19:42 | User Profile
Another feature in that magazine was about internet in Africa. Whitey went extra-mile to lay optical data cable around Africa, and in one of the countries with an optical hub (basically niggers were told here's a powerful optical cable hub for you, use it), it's unused: niggers can't even do this little step of using the bandwidth provided for them by whitey.
OK, I just did a google search and found that article, enjoy :lol:
[url]http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/feb04/0204afri.html[/url]
Africa lit a shiny new fiber-optic undersea cable almost two years ago--so why are so few Africans using it? Text & Photos By Harry Goldstein
Johnson I. Ejimanya is a one-man pony express. Walking the exhaust-fogged streets of Owerri, Nigeria, Ejimanya, the engineering dean of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, carries with him a department's worth of communications, some handwritten, others on disk. He's delivering them to a man with a PC and an Internet connection, who converts the missives into e-mails and downloads the responses. To Ejimanya, broadband means lugging a big bundle of printed e-mails back with him to the university, which despite being one of the country's largest and most prestigious engineering schools has no reliable means of connecting to the Internet.
Owerri is a sprawling town hacked out of the jungle in the heart of the oil-rich Niger Delta region formerly known as Biafra. What galls Ejimanya and his colleagues is that Owerri is barely 50 kilometers from the oil city of Port Harcourt and Nigeria's recently inaugurated 5-Gb/s undersea fiber-optic connection to the outside world. Since the cable landed in the commercial capital of Lagos in December 2001, virtually nothing has been done to hook up the many businesses, schools, and other entities that could benefit from it. And so for Ejimanya and millions of other Nigerians, the high-speed, always-on Internet enjoyed by people in developed countries remains a distant dream.
"If you look at Africa, it's got wonderful telecommunications facilities around it now and some serious capacity to the outside world," says William H. Melody, managing director of LIRNE.NET, an international telecommunications policy think tank. "But communication within Africa has not developed, primarily because of the barriers and restrictions protecting special interests"--typically, the government-owned and -operated telephone monopolies.
It's hard to overestimate the stifling effects of lack of affordable, fast Internet access in a country like Nigeria. Developing countries that are still incapable of providing even one-tenth of the landline telephones, per capita, of a developed country are now faced with a potentially much more serious deficiency, one that they must rectify to integrate themselves into the global economy. Unlike the telephone, which primarily benefited the business and social spheres, the Internet cuts an enormously wider and deeper swath through the educational, medical, intellectual, and cultural spheres of a society.
0204afri01 The Internet is a window to the outside world in places where most international information is scarce. For business people, it can mean the difference between thriving and subsisting. For engineers and researchers, it can propel a career that might otherwise languish in a backwater. For doctors and their patients in a country wracked by AIDS and other scourges, the impact of easy access to good medical information might be tallied in lives saved, or at least prolonged.
Of course, it's the same story in developing countries from Laos to Ecuador, Afghanistan to Zambia. But among countries on the wrong side of the so-called digital divide, Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, now commands attention in a way few others ever have. The reason is a mouthfulââ¬âthe US $650 million, 120-Gb/s South Atlantic Telecommunications Cable No. 3/West African Submarine Cable/South Africa*Far East (SAT-3/WASC/SAFE) Cable.
For many of the sub-Saharan countries where the cable lands, it is the first high-capacity undersea fiber-optic cable to connect them to the rest of the world. Inaugurated into commercial service in April 2002, it was heralded by development officials and others as the beginning of a new chapter in the tortured story of African economic and social development. A happy ending would have Africa skip industrial development and go straight to the Information Age, with customer-service call centers and software-outsourcing businesses providing educated Africans a reason to forgo overseas opportunities and take good paying jobs at home.
But so far, at least, this feel-good story remains unwritten. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, Africa's petroleum resources are garnering far more attention than its human resources from countries looking to decrease reliance on Middle Eastern oil. And Nigeria, a straight shot across the Atlantic to the United States and already that country's fifth leading supplier of oil, seems an attractive alternative. It's no surprise that when President George W. Bush visited Nigeria last July, a subsidiary of the Shell Group was the only company using the SAT-3 cable in Nigeria.
While Shell employees blaze the Web, ordinary Nigerians, who earn on average less than $1 per day, pay $1 per hour to slog the Net at any one of the hundreds of cybercafes that have sprung up all over the country. For those fees they get a satellite connection that crawls along at less than 2 kb/s during the day, with rare bursts of 28 kb/s late at night.
The average Nigerian does not even know the cable exists, I soon learned during a two-week visit last June to Nigeria and South Africa. I talked to dozens of students, entrepreneurs, government bureaucrats, engineers, and professors to hear how cheap, reliable high-speed Internet access could change their lives for the better and how that potential, for many reasons, remains unfulfilled.
What's gone wrong? Only a combination of factors could thwart an opportunity as far-reaching as this one. In Nigeria, any accounting has to start with the bureaucracy and incompetence of the state-run telephone monopoly, Nigerian Telecommunications Ltd. (Nitel) and its government overseer, the Nigerian Communications Commission, both in Nigeria's capital, Abuja. Together, the two organizations hold the authority to create the sort of infrastructure that could make the cable accessible to ordinary Nigerian citizens, students, and businesses, in addition to large multinational corporations.
For now, the cable is perhaps one of the world's most underutilized technological resources. Designed to handle 5.8 million phone calls simultaneously, the cable traces Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's 15th-century journey from Portugal to India. The SAT-3 section of the cable stretches 14 341 km from Sesimbra, Portugal, to Melkbosstrand, South Africa, passing through eight west African countries along the way. At Melkbosstrand the SAT-3 hooks up with the 13 104-km SAFE portion, which goes through Reunion and Mauritius islands, splitting into two branches that terminate at Cochin, India, and Penang, Malaysia. The cable is owned by a consortium of 36 companies, including many African national telecommunications incumbents, among them Nitel, which contributed nearly $50 million to the cost of the cable, and Telkom SA, Pretoria, South Africa, which chipped in $85 million [see map, "Out of Africa"].
Internet traffic from Africa has increased fivefold over the last four years. But according to Alan Mauldin, senior analyst at TeleGeography, a research division of PriMetrica Inc., of Carlsbad, Calif., a year after the SAT-3 cable was "turned on," the continent's total Internet capacity was only 3.226 Gb/s: 1.351 Gb/s between Africa and the United States; 1.875 between Africa and Europe. With more than 13 percent of the world's population, Africa accounts for only 0.2 percent of the world's total international Internet capacity.
While TeleGeography pegs usage on the cable at less than 3 percent of its design maximum, the consortium sees the glass fiber as half full. "The usage is already beyond expectations, not only for South Africa, but the whole of western Africa," says Kobus Stoeder, acting executive, Global Capacity Business, International and Special Markets Segment for Telkom, the administrator of the cable for the consortium. "The only aspect that may be causing some growth stagnation is that in many of these countries, the backhaul network is not quite accessible or may not be fully in place or may not have the capacity to support international access."
In other words, it's one thing to lay a fiber-optic undersea cable and bring it to shore; it is quite another to create the internal infrastructureââ¬âbe it fiber-optic cable or wireless broadband radio nodes--necessary to distribute its bandwidth.
WHERE IT EXISTS AT ALL, the Nigerian telecommunications infrastructure is dilapidated. Even the main switching station of the SAT-3 in Lagos is in poor shape, and it isn't even two years old.
Accompanied by members Oyewole Funso-Adebayo and Tunde Salihu, I venture to Nitel's headquarters in the Ikoyi district of Lagos, a hulking black and blue concrete building that looks like a decrepit stadium. The elevators don't work, so we climb four flights of stairs to the vast, well-appointed but sweltering office of engineer O.B. Okusanya, the deputy general manager of the Lagos International Gateway. Okusanya steps out from behind his huge desk and marches 10 meters down a red carpet to greet us.
Funso-Adebayo presents a memo from a Nitel administrator authorizing my visit. After a few suspicious glances at me, Okusanya leads us back downstairs to the first floor and down a long, dank hallway lined with broken chairs, blue paint peeling from the walls and ceiling. Finally, we reach the main switching station for the SAT-3 in Nigeria. From here, at least in theory, high-bandwidth connections will feed out to the rest of the country.
As the door creaks open, an engineer abruptly stops playing PacMan on his PC and stands to greet us. A dozen others emerge from around the racks of switching equipment and from an adjacent room where several meter-tall batteries stand in rows like soldiers at attention, ready for action the next time the power fails. This could happen at any moment, thanks to the stunning ineptitude of the National Electric Power Authority, the state-owned power monopoly.
Alcatel SA, Paris, France, brought the cable ashore in December 2001 [see photo, "Networking Nigeria"] and left the Nigerians to their own rather limited devices to get this station up and running. A dearth of funds, equipment, and experienced telecommunications engineers meant the cable didn't start handling traffic to and from Nigeria until April 2003, two months before I visited.
Two wavelengths are available at Lagos, each 2.5 Gb/s, though only a tiny fraction of one is being used now. Each 2.5-Gb/s bundle is subdivided into 16 synchronous transport mode 1 (STM-1) frames, each capable of handling 155 Mb/s, which can be broken down into smaller units for sale to customers. According to U.I. Nwokocha, chief of transmission, as of last June Nitel was using 78 percent of the capacity of only one of the 13 available STM-1 frames. The sole customer was Shell, which takes advantage of Nigeria's lone major fiber-optic connection, running from Lagos to Port Harcourt, where Shell has oil and gas production facilities.
The paucity of paying customers for the cable certainly isn't due to lack of interest; Nwokocha says Nitel gets inquiries every day from companies that want access to the cable. But the same problems that delayed the cable from going into service--lack of funds, equipment, and experienced engineers--has retarded Nitel's ability to meet demand for high-speed Internet access, not to mention plain old telephone service. In 40 years of monopoly control of Nigeria's telecommunications, Nitel managed to put in only 500 000 landlines to serve 130 million people. Combine those shortcomings with Nitel's inability to market its services, and it's little wonder that the company has blown such a major opportunity.
Realizing that Nitel's managers were squandering a national resource, the Nigerian government took two steps--it introduced competition, and it brought in management help for Nitel. In 2002, a private company, Lagos-based Globacom, paid $200 million for a license from the Nigerian Communications Commission to become the second national fixed line and wireless operator. The company, which started wireless operations last August, has promised to lay 10 000 km of fiber-optic cable to distribute SAT-3 bandwidth. As the second national operator, Globacom is guaranteed access to SAT-3, but it must negotiate the logistics and pricing of that access with Nitel.
To fix Nitel, the government last year brought in Pentascope International BV, in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, to manage the company. Pentascope is cleaning up the books, trying to collect tens of billions of naira (140 naira is US $1) from delinquent customers, and, according to Nwokocha, planning a promotional campaign around the SAT-3.
For now, though, those few Nigerians who even know about the SAT-3 are frustrated by their inability to get on it. Perhaps no one is more impatient than Aloy Chife, the president and CEO of portal and application service provider Socketworks, based in Lagos, and a former information technology (IT) director of the collapsed Houston-based energy-trading giant Enron Corp.
0204afri02 Chife's office is decked out with a complete Wi-Fi network and his own satellite connection to a server farm in California, a paltry 256 kb/s for downloads and an even tinier 64-kb/s pipe for uploads. Socketworks doesn't rely on the inept National Electric Power Authority but on its own 16 diesel power generators. Chife dreams big: starting with his company, he wants to nurture Nigeria's neophyte IT industries into an outsourcing powerhouse to rival India's.
"The idea is to leapfrog industrial development. We haven't even scratched the surface of IT in Nigeria," says Chife, who also points out that the markets for PCs and peripherals are saturated in the developed world and that Nigeria is still virgin territory.
Unfortunately, the ability of overseas companies to do business in Nigeria hinges on gaining access to the SAT-3, the same fat pipe that could make Socketworks a global competitor. And Nitel has done little to install fiber so businesses in Lagos can get on the broadband bandwagon. Chife had to pay $13 000 to install his own satellite system, including dish, modem, and router, and monthly fees of around $1000. "This country could blossom, but the cost of the Internet is too expensive," he says.
Cutting those costs won't be easy. Any attempt to distribute SAT-3 bandwidth will be hindered by a host of challenges, including huge investment overhead. With interest rates for business loans of 25 percent, companies prefer activities that will turn a quick buck--like prepaid wireless, which since 2001 has brought telephone service to more than three million Nigerians through Econet Wireless Nigeria; Globacom; MTN Nigeria Communications Ltd.; and Nitel's cellular unit, Nigeria Mobile Telecommunications Ltd. (M-Tel).
"There can be explosive growth in the Nigerian telecom market," says Titi Omo-Ettu, a telecommunications consultant and director of Executive Cyberschuul, an IT training center in Lagos. "But without the commitment to long-term infrastructure development, the whole sector could come crashing down," as customers lose confidence in their providers' ability to give them quality service at reasonable prices.
In Lagos, there's an Internet cafe on just about every block, and in the busy streets, warbling polyphonic ring tones compete with honking horns. To get a taste of the telecommunications situation out in the country, Funso-Adebayo and I hop a flight to Owerri in what used to be called Biafra, where a bloody civil war claimed up to two million lives in the late 1960s.
From the Owerri airport, we share a cab with E.C. Iroakazi, an engineer contracted by M-Tel and MTN to put up cellphone base stations in the area. As the beat-up Peugeot snakes along shattered roads that meander through thick brush broken by the occasional palm tree, we borrow Iroakazi's cellphone to call Funso-Adebayo's roommates, some of whom cannot afford rent but still manage to scrounge up enough cash for prepaid mobile service.
Owerri proper pulsates with people in cars and on motorcycles, others on foot hurrying through the streets, some in and out of sidewalk shacks that offer the use of a mobile phone for 30 naira per minute. Hundreds of people jam the huge market in the town center, while others frequent the numerous, bustling Internet cafes [see photo, "Southwest by West"].
Dawn breaks the next day with Funso-Adebayo knocking on my hostel room door to take me on a walk around suburban Owerri before our scheduled visit to the Federal University of Technology (FUTO) [see photo, "Networking Nigeria"]. As we stroll down the rutted red-mud streets, he points out a house that had been set ablaze by an angry mob just a few years ago after it got out that it was sheltering a cult, known as the Otokoto Seven. After being convicted of ritual killing and trafficking in human flesh, the seven men had been sentenced to death by hanging just months before; three policemen had also been condemned in 2002 after being convicted of killing the informant who had brought the Otokoto's crimes to light.
My unease intensifies as we approach the ruined house, and the armed policeman standing near its front gate. We get about 10 meters past him and then a shot rings out, a thunderclap that echoes off the surrounding houses with a sharp crack. I nervously peer over my shoulder and then at Funso-Adebayo.
"He's just showing us that he has bullets in the gun," he reassures me.
Nigerians like Funso-Adebayo manage to deal with many dangerous, disturbing things over which they have little control: random gunshots, debilitating malarial fevers, constant power outages, endemic corruption, the occasional military dictatorship, and perpetually retarded economic and technological development.
But sometimes the frustration can be too much to bear, especially when there's someone there to listen.
"As a nation, we are saying we want to catch up, but how can you catch up when your government spends less than 5 percent of GDP on education?" asks Dean Ejimanya when Funso-Adebayo and I finally arrive at the FUTO campus.
In his dark office, which has not had power for two days, Ejimanya explains his improvised e-mail system. He also tells us that each of the 13 departments in the school of engineering has a single computer, which 8000 engineering students use at one point or another to do projects. The one in Ejimanya's office is partitioned to handle Windows 98, 2000, and Linux. It also holds the student database. And there's no backup. "If the hard drive goes, that's it," Ejimanya sighs.
Given the anger many Delta residents harbor for the oil companies that pump crude out of their region and leave behind nothing but environmental devastation, it would probably be a good public relations move for one of them to invest what amounts to pocket change to buy a few computers for FUTO. Ejimanya says several companies have broken promises to donate computer labs and Internet access. Indeed, a few weeks after I returned from Nigeria, Sola Omole, an official in Nigeria of Chevron Texaco Inc., New Orleans, La., assured me that the company had committed $1 million to build a computer center there. But as of December, it was still just talk.
THE INTRODUCTION OF COMPETITION in the Nigerian market in the form of both Globacom and a booming, though illegal, trade in voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) at cybercafes is already forcing Nitel to compete. In December the company announced that it would take advantage of reduced bandwidth costs afforded by its SAT-3 connection to lower its international calling rates by 50 percent.
The benefits of even the limited competition now starting in Nigeria still elude consumers in Africa's most potent economy, South Africa. Here telecommunications is dominated by the former state monopoly, Telkom. The International Telecommunication Union, Geneva, Switzerland, estimates that the average South African would have to pay 40 percent of his monthly income for Telkom's ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) broadband service, while a person in the UK would pay about 1.5 percent of her monthly income for the same bandwidth.
South Africans can blame their lack of affordable high-speed Internet access on their elected government. The government's partial ownership of Telkom has long stifled efforts to introduce a second national operator to compete in fixed-line voice and data services. Critics contend that the South African government's ownership position damaged the credibility of its telecommunications policy and regulatory process, and made potential international investors think twice, or not at all, about taking on Telkom in a market rigged in its favor.
The irony is that Telkom would be a formidable competitor even without a public policy warped to its advantage. Much as Nigeria turned to Pentascope for its management expertise, in 1997 the South African government sold 30 percent of Telkom to a strategic investor with managerial control, Thintana Communications LLC, a joint venture of SBC Communications Inc., Austin, Texas, and Telekom Malaysia Berhad, Kuala Lumpur.
In financial terms, the deal has been a bonanza. Under the guidance of an SBC management team, the bloated Telkom shed tens of thousands of jobs to become an efficient, and very profitable, telecommunications dynamo. In March 2003, the South African government cashed in some of its chips by selling off 27.7 percent of the company in an initial public offering, keeping a 39.3 percent stake.
Private investors and the South African government have been richly rewarded. For the fiscal year ended 31 March 2003, basic earnings per share increased 33.5 percent; the price per share has more than doubled since the company went public.
Telkom's monopoly has had far-reaching consequences for all South Africans. On the one hand, the company has invested billions of rand in Africa's most technologically sophisticated telecommunications network. On the other hand, the company has kept such tight control of bandwidth that to many ordinary South Africans, Internet access is still as precious as the country's famous diamonds.
Keeping watch over that valuable resource are the engineers I meet in Melkbosstrand, a quiet seaside suburb about 30 minutes drive from Cape Town. This is where the SAT-2, SAT-3, and SAFE cables all land and feed into Telkom's cable station. There's a national switching room here, too, through which flows all of South Africa's overseas voice and data traffic.
After working together for a decade, Karl Jones and Eddie Croeser, both submarine cable specialists, have an almost marital rapport, and they rattle off facts about the SAT-3 cable like proud parents talking about their very precocious child. The SAT-3, like the SAFE and the SAT-2, has only two fiber pairs conducting all that bandwidth through 191 submerged repeaters spaced about 80 km apart. Jones and Croeser monitor the SAT-3 and SAFE underwater plant--cable, repeaters, and branching units--from this station to check for problems like line breaks [see photos, "Keepers of the Cable" and "Maintenance at Sea"].
Croeser shows me one workstation where he could view all the other cable stations. The fiber-optic cable needs light of a specific wavelength pumped into it to excite the erbium atoms in optical amplifiers, which in turn emit the right wavelength when the erbium atoms fall to a lower energy state. More bits require more power. I asked to see Lagos, which, no surprise, was putting about 1/1000 the amount of power into the line as Melkbosstrand.
Clearly, technology and the money to pay for good engineers and a world-class infrastructure aren't the problem in South Africa. Cost is. That's why Christo van der Rheede keeps his 64-kb/s ISDN modem under lock and key.
Van der Rheede is principal of the Silversands Primary School in Kuilsrivier, a township formerly known as Plastic City, in Cape Town, South Africa. He shows me his setup in a locked room at the back of the computer lab. The lab was paid for and installed by a two-year-old project called Khanya. Silversands is just one of some 300 Khanya schools in the Western Cape district that by the end of 2004 will be similarly equipped with new Pentium 4 and Celeron PCs running an array of educational software packages.
Van der Rheede keeps the Internet locked away for good reason. Access costs 400 rand per month (about US $60) and the cost of usage over the bare minimum would have to come out of another Silversands program's budget. So every day van der Rheede comes to this glorified closet to download e-mail, which he then distributes via the school's internal network.
For now, the Silversands lab and the school's limited Internet connectivity are enough to give kids a huge confidence boost and substantially improve their math and science test scores: in 43 Khanya schools surveyed, the number of students earning A's more than doubled in 2002 over 2001, while the number of those earning passing grades jumped 42 percent. By increasing students' chances of moving on to university, the computer lab has come to be seen as a community asset, the kind of resource that nonwhite South Africans were denied for so long under apartheid.
0204afri03.jpg Van der Rheede would like nothing better than to get all the kids more access to the Internet. That might happen in the next few months, but students will probably surf the Internet via satellite.
0.2% of the world's internet Traffic comes from africa
Géza Z. Fagyas, a technology consultant to the Western Cape school district, told me he's so frustrated with Telkom and its high prices that the Western Cape school district is now negotiating with satellite provider Sentech (Pty) Ltd., Honeydew, South Africa, which has promised a deep discount and a minimum of 64 kb/s to each of the district's 1500 schools.
"There's a lot of multimedia that we'd like learners to have, but that's horrendously expensive on dial-up," says Fagyas. ADSL is a wonderful alternative, he says, but Telkom restricts traffic volumes as well as bandwidth. Telkom's DSL is limited to 512 kb/s, for 800 rand (about $120) for business customers per month. Telkom also caps downloads for its 11 500 ADSL customers at 3 GB per month, after which a customer is switched to a slower connection in the 14.4*28.8-kb/s range. By contrast, business DSL (1.5 Mb/s) in the United States is about $90 per month for three times the bandwidth and no volume restrictions. Prices in a few countries, such as Korea and Canada, are even lower.
Such high pricing in the face of dramatically reduced bandwidth costs is "almost criminal," according to LIRNE.NET's Melody, who is also a professor at the Technical University of Denmark. "It is crippling for these people. And it's not just a failure to take advantage of an opportunity to develop a sector which can then develop the whole economy, they're actually destroying value," he contends. "Education is a good case in point. In order to get any minimal connections at all, people have to make enormous cutbacks in other things they do. The whole business of e-education turns out to be a bit of a farce under these conditions."
Wally Beelders, Telkom managing executive for international and special market services, counters that bandwidth prices in Africa will never be in the same league as those in Europe and the United States. "It is all a question of scales of economy," he says. "In Europe and the U.S.A. there are hundreds of millions of users who share the high-cost layout of submarine cables, whereas in Africa a much smaller number have to pay for vast infrastructure to get connected to the Northern Hemisphere."
Telkom's restrictions cost users money in other ways. Most notably, it blocks the use of VoIP services. Across Africa and around the globe, businesses and consumers have been finding ways to turn otherwise expensive telephone calls into data packets, which can then be transmitted over the Internet at much lower cost or even free. But as South Africa's telecommunications monopoly, Telkom is the only company licensed to carry voice communications, and current legislation prohibits Internet service providers and value-added network services companies from providing VoIP services. Such services could provide stiff competition to Telkom by driving down costs for both local and international calls, a potential boon for companies trying to imitate the international outsourcing success of India.
Telkom can hardly be blamed for taking advantage of the monopoly powers granted by the South African government. The five-year government-mandated monopoly position was supposed to end on 7 May 2002, and with it a number of restrictions on competition, but the communications minister has so far refused to sign the necessary documents. This prodigious cash cow has left the government with a clear conflict of interest. How can the government regulate a company in which it has a vested, and very lucrative, interest and at the same time license a second national operator, in which it will own at least a 30 percent stake, to compete with that company?
The short answer is: not very well.
In the last year, the South African ministry of communications twice rejected consortia that were vying to be the majority shareholder in the second national operator the ministry was supposed to license three years ago, claiming that their international partners didn't have the wherewithal or commitment to compete with Telkom. That left the three other shareholders, two of which have already made substantial infrastructure investments, swinging in the wind: Nexus Connexion in Marshalltown, a holding company that represents traditionally disadvantaged (nonwhite) South African investors; Transtel in Joubert Park, a unit of the state transportation monopoly; and Eskom Enterprises (Pty) Ltd. in Johannesburg, a unit of the state energy monopoly.
Transtel and Eskom have between them invested more than 1 billion rand ($150 million) in building fiber-optic infrastructure along railway and power lines in anticipation of operations beginning last year. Their investment lies idle, a cost in terms of cash and lost opportunity.
Now those investments might just pay off. After months of indecision, at the beginning of January, the ministry of communications gave two groups it had previously rejected, CommuniTel and Two Consortium, each a 13 percent stake in the second national operator. The South African government will hold onto the remaining 25 percent stake. The new company is expected to launch fixed-line, Internet, and cellphone service sometime this year.
Even as South Africa launches a second national operator, the ultimate effect on the market could be minimal at best, says Melody. History shows managed duopolies don't improve a country's telecommunications landscape, he says, especially when the government is a significant owner of both companies.
Still, it's important to remember that the new South Africa wrote its first telecommunications law in 1996. Given time, many South Africans believe market liberalization will eventually come to a country that has undergone a remarkable transformation in the one decade since its first democratic elections.
Indeed, fast, affordable telecommunications is the linchpin for the economic and social transformation of Africa as a whole. Good telecommunications can make other basic services--health care, finance, clean water, electricity, housing, transportation--run more efficiently and cost effectively. But before those benefits can ripple through the broader economy, serious reforms must take hold all over the continent.
"What's happening in Africa isn't any different than what's happened everywhere else," Melody concludes. "Very often it takes a decade or more for people to learn from good and bad experiences and to gradually bring about and effectively implement the necessary policy changes."
2005-08-20 19:47 | User Profile
here be more cool water-gun-inventing nigga (of course, a supersoaker is an invention that guarantees a nigger a place in the genious gallery and coverage in an engineering magazine)
[url]http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=p070102[/url]
From Squirts to Hertz
Inventor Lonnie Johnson struck gold with the SuperSoaker water gun, and hopes to strike again with a miniature power source
By Susan Karlin, Contributing Editor
As a NASA aerospace engineer in the early 1980s, Lonnie G. Johnson would get home from work and tinker on widgets into the wee hours. One pet project involved hooking up the sink to a heat pump that used water pressure instead of the less environmentally friendly Freon.
"I wanted to see how strong a pump I could make by forcing water through a nozzle with a vacuum chamber," recalls Johnson. "It shot a stream of water sheer across the bathroom." While many a man might have stared at the drenched wallpaper wondering how in the world to explain the mess to his wife, Johnson had only one thought: "This would make a neat water gun."
Thus was born the SuperSoaker, which first hit toy stores in 1989 and remains on the Top 10 list of best-selling toys. Its various models cost between US $10 and $60 and have raked in more than $400 million in sales, earning Johnson a spot in the Hasbro Inventor's Hall of Fame. The royalties have also allowed him to start up his own companies and pursue inventing full-time. At present, he is keen on his team's efforts to devise more efficient engines, fuel cells, batteries, and microelectrical mechanical systemsââ¬âwork that he began around the same time as the SuperSoaker but only now has the means to commercialize.
The professor With more than 100 awarded and pending patentsââ¬âfor everything from hair-drying rollers to soil moisture metersââ¬âJohnson is among a small group of African-American inventors whose work accounts for 6 percent of all U.S. patent applications.
"I have the privilege of my work standing on its own," he says. It wasn't always so. "Racial inequity was more apparent to me as a child," he told IEEE Spectrum.
Johnson grew up poor in Mobile, Ala., which was then segregated. One of six kids of a father who drove Air Force vehicles and a mother who worked as a nurse's assistant, the young Johnson was known around his neighborhood as "the professor," a child prodigy who won a statewide high school science competition for turning junkyard scraps into a remote-controlled robot nearly a meter tall that ran on compressed air. His parents encouraged the experiments, even when he set off explosions in the kitchen. "My mother gave me a hot plate and told me to go mix the rocket fuel outside," he laughs. "My parents were very patient with me."
His tinkering plus whopping SAT scores won him a math scholarship to Tuskegee Institute, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's in nuclear engineering. From his 1975 graduation to 1990, he shuttled between engineering gigs with the Air Force, where he worked on the Stealth bomber, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., where he helped design the spacecraft systems for the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Mars Observer, and the Cassini mission to Saturn, garnering numerous engineering awards along the way.
"Lonnie found extremely innovative solutions for problemsââ¬âhe always had a fresh approach and came up with ideas no one had thought of before," recalls Matt Landano, director of JPL's Office of Safety and Mission Success, who served as Johnson's supervisor on the Galileo project. "He also has a really dynamic personality and could persuade others based on the merits of his ideas rather than arm waving."
"He was always doing a lot of inventing at home and at times his wife felt neglected," says David Durham, a JPL senior systems engineer who worked with Johnson on the Voyager mission in the mid-1970s. "But when the water gun began to take off, he said, 'Now my wife won't have to do housework again.' "
Sticking to his guns Although his bathroom-drenching experiment and subsequent fine-tuning of the SuperSoaker took place in 1982, it was another seven years of ignored letters, toy trade show networking, and two false starts with manufacturers before Johnson successfully licensed the water gun to Larami Corp. (Philadelphia), now a division of toy giant Hasbro Inc.
That experience is fairly typical for independent inventors, Johnson says [see "Words of Wisdom for Wanna-Be Inventors"]. Companies often prefer to use in-house talent to design around an invention rather than pay royalties. But the SuperSoaker had both novelty and timeliness in its favor. Its sci-fi look skirted mounting public concerns over more realistic toy guns. But what sold Larami execs was when Johnson blasted coffee cups off the conference table from across the room.
The success of the SuperSoaker gave Johnson both the financial means and the professional clout to quit his day job and invent full-time. He set up two companies, Johnson Research and Development and Excellatron, both based in Atlanta, Ga., whose combined staffs of 30 now develop new consumer products, toys, and environmentally friendly alternative methods of power. They also invest in technology start-ups and do community outreach, including setting up an inner-city manufacturing plant and visiting local schools to introduce youngsters to the world of inventing.
Johnson prefers to work in a kind of stream-of-consciousness mode, often gaining inspiration for one idea while working on something else or simply letting his mind wander. And so his companies are set up to accommodate like creative mindsââ¬âwork hours are unstructured and flexible, and the dress code leans toward shorts and T-shirts.
The next big thing Wherever he is and whatever he is doing, Johnson is always mindful of that next hit invention. Much of the research he supports now centers on the battery and fuel cell arena, based on ideas that Johnson has been tossing around for quite a while. "I had started focusing on the water gun because I was having a hard time getting my other technology sold," he told Spectrum. "In the battery world, the barrier to entry is high, because those companies have expensive R&D labs, and a small indie inventor can't do battle with a big gorilla on its terms."
To help fund his firm's efforts, he's received contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA, which are interested in new power sources for regions and applications where traditional power is unavailable, such as outer space and military operations.
This year, the company plans to test-market an advanced rechargeable ceramic battery that can handle extremely high temperatures (up to 260 à ¡C), faster processors, and harsher environments than those using liquids or polymers. Johnson is mum on the design details, but says the batteries range in size from standard down to millimeter scale and last up to four times longer than lithium ion batteries. Those features make them ideal for smart cards.
But what truly excites Johnson is a miniature power source that would draw energy from the heat in its surroundings, storing the excess for when additional power is needed or when the ambient temperature drops too low. The device is still in the early stages of development, but Johnson says it incorporates some of his other designs for microelectromechanical systems and batteries able to weather extreme temperature changes.
It's a controversial idea, to be sure. "People get skeptical when I talk about this, because it sounds like a perpetual motion machine," Johnson admits. "But that's what makes it exciting." He laughs, and it's clear that what drives this inventor is as much the challenge of the process as the prospect of success. "Think about what impact a self-recharging battery would have on the electronics industryââ¬âto cellphones, computers, aeronautics."
"I spat in the tiger's eye once. Maybe I could do it again."
2005-08-20 20:57 | User Profile
First time in a long time that I have read each word in an article instead of skipp reading......thanks for posting both articles.
2005-08-20 21:15 | User Profile
There are 3 articles, Ponce :biggrin:
2005-08-20 21:26 | User Profile
[QUOTE][I]here be more cool water-gun-inventing nigga (of course, a supersoaker is an invention that guarantees a nigger a place in the genious gallery and coverage in an engineering magazine)[/I]
Inventor Lonnie Johnson struck gold with the SuperSoaker water gun, and hopes to strike again with a miniature power source
ABOUT THE AUTHOR G. Pascal Zachary is the author of The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy (2003). His research on information technology in Africa was supported in part by the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, in Tempe.[/QUOTE]Well clearly if your authoring articles like [I]The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy[/I] (2003), you have to take what you can get. :wink:
2005-08-20 21:40 | User Profile
This "invention" earned the diversity candidate Lonnie the 1st position in a lineup of the top 10 inventors in an article I must have posted at another forum. I kid you not. I even posted a scanned image of that, with the great white inventors taking subordinate position to Lonnie.
2005-08-20 22:38 | User Profile
Yes madrussian and thanks, where you guys see niggers I see inventors and thinking people like myself rather than to just sit infront of a monitor and attack others.
I am not talking about you guys perse but in general, my world is one of ideas where I can see ways to make things easiers by making one small improvement.
Lets face it guys, once in a while you find a diamond in a bucket of coal.
2005-08-21 01:11 | User Profile
[QUOTE]
Lets face it guys, once in a while you find a diamond in a bucket of coal.
[/QUOTE]Yes, you do, but even as you said "once in a while" As far as niggers are concerned, that diamond is very rare. That is why when they do "find" that one diamond they have to constantly hold it up for everyone to inspect, so to speak.:biggrin: It makes the much larger bucket of coal look just a little better.
And why do they always have to refer to turd-world shitholes as "developing countries" which obviously implies that one day they will be "developed" when and how exactly is this going to miraculously happen?
2005-08-21 03:04 | User Profile
In an African country, a programmer faces essentually no competition, so it shouldn't take much skill to be a success. It doesn't take much skill for such things as taking the code of others and changing English text strings to whatever the local language is. That's probably what is meant by "AFRICANIZED CODE." It also didn't hurt this programmer that he had a lot of education from whites.
2005-08-21 04:57 | User Profile
Never mind Ponch, he's a troll.
2005-08-21 05:29 | User Profile
Rusky? if to think outside the circle is to be a "troll" then I guess that I am one, the world is more than just you and I .
If however you want for the whole world to agree with you then you should sit acrosss a mirrow and talk to yourself, you then would be very happy.
For example it took me a long time to find out who the Jews (Zionists) really are because I gave them all the excuses to be what they are and at the end I found out that they were bad and that was it.
I suggest Ruskie that instead of attacking the messenger you try to find out what the messege is and if you don't understand it then ask why.
It is one of the tactics of the Jews to attack whenever they don't understand the message or disagree with it........spasiva.
2005-08-21 07:25 | User Profile
Ponce, I don't think you are a troll, but what doesn't make sense is that you seem unwilling to look at a people as a whole, and you are instead of the mindset of "you have to look at people as individuals" except when it comes to the Jews. Don't you see anything contradictory in that?
I notice you threw in the word "Zionists", though you always seem to use the word "Jews" As I am sure you know not all Jews are Zionists, and if you are just talking about Zionist jews as opposed to Jews in general, then maybe you are just a vehemently anti-Zionist leftist? I am confused.:glare:
2005-08-21 09:44 | User Profile
How many Silicon Valley computer programmers could leave their comfy air-conditioned offices and run an IT business in the third world using 386s powered by diesel generators?
As a nationalist I love hearing about Negro success stories (however modest they may seem) taking place IN AFRICA. As with morality, the technological achievements of alien societies should be judged and respected on their own terms without reference to Western standards, provided that in turn we have the right to assert our own identity and values as absolutes within our own civilisation. Isn't this part of the essence of nationalism?
I don't want to live with blacks, but I certainly wish them well in their own countries. The rest of Africa is mostly wall-to-wall genocide, child warfare and mass starvation. Even if it's the inevitable result of innate racial tendencies, I really hate to see it. So good on Mr Chinery-Hesse for making a positive difference in his homeland.
If it wasn't for the propaganda value in favour of multiracial diversity in the West this would be a perfect story, so why the cheap shots?
2005-08-21 15:05 | User Profile
You see the bigger picture of this being just used for propaganda, so why the question? And the answer to your question is obvious: there are no achievements here to speak of to justify coverage in an engineering journal. This is just another "diversity is our strength and niggers are as smart as whites but much cooler, strongere and nobler" mantra.
Africa as the next "outsourcing mecca" mantra has already been tried. This is from the same series. You won't lure American niggers back to Africa anyway, so there's no any other point in this story except propaganda. Look at who's the author.
2005-08-21 15:19 | User Profile
[QUOTE=starr]Ponce, I don't think you are a troll[/QUOTE] Ponch has been caught manufacturing bullshit stories several times. You have to be blind to not see him for what he is.
2005-08-21 16:39 | User Profile
starr, to me the "real" Jews are those of the Bible who were in Palestine before 1938 and were always friends to the Arabs.
The Khazards Zionists are the trouble makers that became Jews for convinience, before being kicked out of Central Asia and then going to Northern Europe and from there to the whole world.
Once in a while I do write "Zionists" next to Jews but not all the time.
And as you know even the "real" Jews have been kicked out of over 70 countries for also being trouble makers, is not because of their religion but for the way that they act by trying to take over the government as they have done in the USA.
They tried to control the Germans and the Russians and you saw what happened, in german by controlling the currency and by doing that the government, and in Russia by forming the Communist Party in order to bring all the money to one place and this way also control the country. But that's another story.
In the beginning 7 of 8 members of the Poliburo were Jews and the same ratio for the rest of the new Communist government.
I could "rant" on this subject for a long time so I better sopped it now, more info on request.
2005-08-21 16:48 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]Ponch has been caught manufacturing bullshit stories several times. You have to be blind to not see him for what he is.[/QUOTE]
Interestin my Russian friend, if you think that I ever "manufacturing" any thing then please tell me which one and I'll be more than glad to expand on my "lie" heheheeheheheheh.
You really don't know "everything" that I have done and even to me sometimes it sounds like bull, not always have I been sitting infront of a monitor.
You know, this is something that I have noticed about the American people in general, they are now insulting the message without first asking what the message is all about and this is something that the Jews do all the time.
2005-08-21 17:23 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]You see the bigger picture of this being just used for propaganda, so why the question?
Yes, the point of these stories is to tell us blacks can do anything whites can do and so if blacks aren't equally represented in programming, technology fields, math, etc., it is only because of whites oppressing blacks.
I don't for a second think this black guy would write original code well enough to be competative with other programmers in the western world. And, if he could, he represents a statistical exception, an exception helped greatly by being educated, lifted, by whites.