People

Father of Invention

MacArthur 'Genius' Looks to Change the World from Alameda Point

    Can a three-minute phone call change your life? If you’re Saul Griffith of Makani Power,  at Alameda Point, it can. The call he received in September 2007 came from the MacArthur Foundation, telling him he’d won a $500,000 fellowship, or genius award, as it’s often called.
    He had no idea the call was coming, since the nomination process is extremely secretive. When the caller asked Griffith whether he’d ever heard of the MacArthur Foundation, he replied, “Aren’t they the guys that sponsor NPR?”
    Griffith borrows a line from Mission Impossible to describe how the caller suggested he use the money. “Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to spend half a million dollars doing good things in the world for the next five years.” Fellows may do anything they want with the money, because it’s a no-strings-attached award. The fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight and potential.
    Griffith couldn’t believe the news at first. “You’re sort of in shock. When the phone call was over, I started wracking my brain for which friend had that voice and was playing this elaborate trick,” he says.
    The son of an engineer and an artist, Griffith was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. From an early age, he had an interest in science, engineering and invention. He was a tinkerer. “My parents used to joke that no Christmas present would last past the first day before it was taken apart,” he says.
    Griffith, who doesn’t like the term genius, is an inventor, engineer and author whose work spans industrial design, technology and science education. At age 33, he holds patents in optics, textiles and nanotechnology, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    It’s been a short and direct route to Alameda Point for Griffith.
    Upon graduation from MIT in 2004, he and four friends got in a van and came to the Bay Area to start Squid Labs, a “do-tank” of engineers. “We drew a map of the country and tried to pick the place that was closest to good universities, high technology centers, venture capital—and lots of wind because we’re all kite surfers,” he says.
    After spending nearly two years in a warehouse just down the street from Pixar Studios in Emeryville, they were thrilled to get the lease on the old Alameda Naval Air Station’s air traffic control tower building. They have the point of the Point. “It felt like we won the lottery,” he says. Their offices look directly at the Bay Bridge, downtown San Francisco and beyond. “The view is amazing,” he says.
    They needed more room to expand and house the three new companies spun off from Squid and Griffith’s various ideas and inventions. Currently, in addition to Squid, the building holds OptiOpia, Potenco and Makani Power. “The Point allows us to do a lot of testing of the technologies we’re working on. It’s got nice runways,” he says.
    In awarding the fellowship to Griffith, the MacArthur Foundation called him “a prodigy of invention in service of the world community.” Griffith’s innovations in eye care and eyeglasses may soon help the developing world see better.
    The world is out of focus to an estimated 500 million to a billion people who don’t have access to affordable eye care and eyeglasses. As a result, they have a lower quality of life and lower productivity.
    While a student at MIT in 2000, Griffith traveled on a Lions Club mission to Guyana to deliver eyeglasses. “It’s easy to think that everyone who needs glasses has them,” says Griffith.
    He invented a compact auto-refractor to determine the corrective lens prescription and a molder for on-the-spot eyeglass lens manufacture. Both machines are portable and resilient, and eliminate the need for an optometrist, a major cost in eye care. “In some countries, there’s simply no one outside of the capital cities who’s trained to diagnose refractive error,” says David Grosof, Ph.D., who co-founded OptiOpia with Griffith.
    Lesser-trained technicians will be able to diagnose a person’s refractive error and produce glasses quickly and cheaply. “Picture most of what you need for an optician’s shop fitting on to the back of a bike,” says Grosof. Field tests will begin this year.
    Griffith’s inventions have garnered him awards before. The first version of the lens molder earned him the 2004 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize of $30,000 and the 2005 Collegiate Inventors award from the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Griffith’s smart rope, which has electronically active fibers interwoven in it so it can monitor its strain and when it will break, was named one of “The Most Amazing Inventions of 2005” in Time magazine.
    These days, as the CEO and chief scientist of Makani Power, the bulk of Griffith’s time is spent on the development of wind-energy technologies. Griffith, an articulate man who isn’t usually afraid to express his opinion, is uncharacteristically reluctant to discuss the details of the high-altitude wind-energy technology Makani is developing. “It’ll be great,” he says.
    In 2006, Makani’s future got a big lift from Google, which invested $10 million in the new company. Makani, which means wind in Hawaiian, is the largest of Griffith’s four companies and has a staff of 30 engineers, prototype makers and software engineers.
    Google’s investment in Makani is part of its broader initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources and ones less expensive than coal, the cheapest source of power now available. “Saul’s exceptional background and the world-class team he has pulled together gave us the confidence to back Makani Power’s work to develop high-altitude wind-energy extraction technologies,” says Google.org spokeswoman Jacquelline Fuller. The technology may be in the form of sophisticated kites or windmills, but no one will say for sure.
    Their silence is understandable, though. If Makani gets it right, such an invention could change the world, providing a way to reduce or eliminate the need for oil. Imagine such a world. Griffith certainly can.
    Griffith believes energy is the defining issue of our times. He’s quick to suggest that Alameda Point’s future should be as a technology park for renewable energy and be filled with solar panels and windmills. “It’s a great story, right? Take the former military complex and turn it into what’s needed more than anything else in this country right now, which is renewable-energy research and deployment,” he says.
    Griffith leads a life that leaves as small a carbon footprint as possible. He lives in San Francisco and rides the ferry to Alameda Point each day. When he gets off the ferry, he rides his bike the rest of the way to the office. His primary recreation, kite surfing, uses only wind power.
    You’d think Griffith has been busy enough, right? Wrong. In October 2007, Griffith’s first book, HowToons, a comic book–style children’s science book, hit the bookstores. In two months, it sold out its first printing of 15,000 copies and rose to No. 1 in children’s science books and 45th in all books sold on Amazon.com.
    Its success may have come from the wedding of Griffith and co-author Joost Bonsen’s science experimentation and exploration stories of the book’s two characters, Tucker and Celine, to the colorful comic illustrations of Nick Tragada. HowToons are cartoons that teach readers  “how to” build, create and explore things while using real-life science and engineering principles. “We have a lot of fun telling these adventure stories, and we embed these instructions on how to make your own toys in them,” says Griffith.
    Griffith wrote the book because he’s passionate about sharing the excitement and the adventure of science and engineering with children but finds most science texts too dull. “All the scientists and engineers I know, they are fabulously adventurous, mischievous people. Somehow, when people write science books for kids, they make it sound like the most boring, inane career you could choose,” he says.
    Along with its Web site, www.howtoons.com, the HowToons book can trace its lineage to Web sites Griffith helped start while at MIT’s famous Media Lab: Instructables.com, a do-it-yourself resource, and Thinkcycle.org, a Web community focused on socially conscious engineering solutions. Griffith also used an early version of the HowToons comic book format to illustrate parts of his doctoral thesis.
    Griffith’s recently appeared on Martha Stewart and KRON-TV, Channel 4, to promote the book and is currently writing two new HowToons books.
    While not his first experience with fame, the MacArthur Foundation award and HowToons bring him a new level of media attention and more demands on his time.  “I’m getting used to it. You get better at it with age,” he says jokingly. “I’ve learned to say ‘no.’ ”
    The $500,000 from the MacArthur Foundation is paid quarterly in $25,000 installments but is taxable. In the short term, Griffith says he will most likely use the money to support HowToons while it is in its infancy. But he’s grateful to have money that he can use for any project he chooses. “I’m sure many of my inventive friends would agree; their best work or most interesting work often comes when they have spare resources—time or otherwise—to pursue their whimsy and imagination ... Most of the interesting inventions in the world started out as someone’s hobby,” he says.
    To learn more about Saul Griffith, go to www.saulgriffith.com.