Back when Iron Man came out, one of the memes surrounding it was Jeff Bridges’ line about making things IN A CAVE, WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS. Yeah, that pretty much sums up the genius that is African teen prodigy Kelvin Doe.
Here’s what Kelvin has done before most of us get a driver’s license:
- Built a battery to power his family’s home out of scrap metal, baking soda, and acid.
- Hand-built an RF transmitter, which he uses to broadcast the news to his village in Sierra Leone and the surrounding area.
- And did all of this with broken crap he pulled from the garbage.
Oh, we forgot to mention, he has no formal training. The electronics, the chemistry, the physics — it’s all stuff he largely figured out on his own, and the stuff he built he reverse-engineered from stuff people threw in the trash that was largely broken or otherwise useless. This is a kid who built a generator because his self-engineered radio station could use one. And also built a radio station because his community needed one.
In other words, he doesn’t live in a cave, but he does built pretty much everything out of scraps. Here’s a brief documentary about this amazing kid…
So, yeah, pretty much once MIT lets this kid near the jet propulsion lab, expect to see a guy in armor flying around Boston. Although he probably won’t be blasting metal out of speakers built into it.