When automakers began offering power windows, they just slapped a motor where the hand crank used to go.
Since 1912, when Charles Kettering invented the electric self-starter to replace the hand crank on automobiles, General Motors has been a leader in automotive innovation.
The hand crank charger is more experimental.
FORBES: A Look At OLPC's XO 3.0 Tablet's Solar And Kinetic Chargers
McNierney acknowledged that most customers may bypass the hand cranks but he insisted they are usable. (Six minutes of hand-cranking should produce an hour of run-time.) To test the feature, the organization took out the tablet batteries to see whether the devices could run just by hand crank.
FORBES: A Look At OLPC's XO 3.0 Tablet's Solar And Kinetic Chargers
That chip, along with the custom charging circuitry developed by OLPC and Marvell means that the tablet can be charged by a hand crank at a 10:1 ratio (10 minutes of usage time for every minute spent cranking), or by the optional four watt solar panel cover at a 2:1 ratio on sunny days.
Early in the project the laptop included a hand-crank generator to power the battery.
December212012.com also offers tips on survival and advertisements for the needed gear -- from gas masks to first aid kits and hand-crank radios.
Although running has always been the group's primary focus, in recent years, Achilles has started offering hand-crank wheelchairs, tandem biking, triathlon training and kayaking.
After knee replacement surgery a few years ago, Traum stopped running himself and switched to a hand-crank wheelchair, which is low, has three wheels and is moved by the user's arms.
In some ways, the current shift in computing is the equivalent of what happened when cars became easy to use and drivers only had to turn the key instead of having to hand-crank the engines.
We also covered several off-grid devices that we'd like to have in the event of another storm of Sandy's magnitude -- Nokero's compact SunRay Pro solar charger, Berkey's super-versatile and effective water filter and Eton's hand-crank cellphone charger.
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He bought his first one--an Aeronca Chief with a propeller he had to crank by hand--in 1981 because he was tired of driving 300 miles a day in his pickup truck.
Letter by letter, his ink-stained fingers hand-set type, ink the raised letters with a hand-roller, then crank heavyweight paper through an old-fashioned letterpress.
So far, the company, which employs some 40 people, has produced about 500 hand-made bamboo frames, but this year alone it expects to crank out another 450.
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