Owen Louis, a 21 year old student from Portsmouth (UK), recently discovered a way to power his 5th generation iPod video using nothing more than an onion soaked in Lucozade (a sports energy drink,) and his iPod’s USB cable.
After soaking several onions in Lucozade and connecting them to one another, Louis was able to plunge the stripped end of an iPod’s USB charging cable into the side of the onion and voila!
“By then I had deliberately run down my iPhone to complete flatline battery dead level.
Even when you pressed the ‘on’ switch for several seconds, there wasn’t a peep of life in it.
But connected to my onion battery, the screen began to glow faintly and indicate that, yes, it was charging.
It doesn’t do so for long - five to ten seconds at a time. And the onions do wear out rather quickly. I might have to try a few more varieties before the technology is quite there.”
If Owen Louis was able to charge his iPod video with an onion, I can only imagine that the same methods could be applied to an iPhone/iPod Touch with the same results.
“…the principle is rather glorious, isn’t it? You can charge an iPod from onions. Not very well, but it’s possible.
And with a few hundred, you could almost certainly charge your phone completely.”
November 29th, 2008 at 2:32 am
Owen Louis needs to go back to high school chemistry. You cannot charge an iPod with an onion. He obviously got the idea from a youtube video that shows how to charge your iPod by soaking it in Gatorade and then sticking the usb cable into it. That video is fake. The video claims you can charge the iPod for 15 to 20 minutes.
If you run down the battery on an iPod and then let it sit for a few minutes, when you press the on button it may glow for a few seconds. It has nothing to do with the onion. I hope he had fun picking out onion bits from his usb cable.
Here’s the youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfPJeDssBOM
November 29th, 2008 at 6:00 am
hey matt, you’re wrong. never heard of a potato clock?
http://www.ehow.com/how_18637_make-potato-clock.html
this is something we learned back in elementary school, about 25 years ago. but it’s not enough power to actually charge an ipod due to insufficient voltage; you’d need a lot more potatoes.
November 29th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I’ve heard of a potato clock. That involves two different electrodes, one copper and one zinc. That’s a lot different than just sticking a USB cable In. Besides, you would need about a thousand potatos to generate enough energy to charge an iPod.
November 30th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
haha thats crazy…the things we try these days, you should just make it simple and buy a regular charger instead of a 100 onions..lol
http://www.electronics-n-stuff.com
February 10th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
hey guy nice guess work, but it happened in Nigeria when an undergraduate is writing is final year project using a basket full of tomatoes to power a bulb for 5minutes. It is just a useless experiment with a fast way of wasting resources.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:08 am
This is so bogus. The only thing I got from doing this experiment was the incredibly fun and entertaining activity to be able to pick out pieces of onion from my USB cable. Yeah thanks a lot.