Useless waste and necessary waste　1.1 Blackout at night

The story now goes back about half a century in Showa 20s or 30s (in 1940s or 50s).

I was born in 1947 and I have little memory before entering elementary school, but I remember having power outages at night or in the typhoon season in my elementary school days. Speaking of preparations for blackouts at that time, it was more "candles" than batteries'. I think that dry batteries became relatively free to use monetarily after Mr. Konoshuke Matsushita devised a bicycle lighting lamp using dry batteries. That was when I became late elementary school grades.

I made motors using the kits for elementary school students, surprising at the motors that rotate at high speed only by connecting them with a dry battery. It was fun just to rotate them. I liked the smell of burned oil due to the friction of the rotating shaft at the high speed. It seems natural to have thought whether making electric fans and cars was possible using the motor. It was an era when I often dreamed that I would get a motorized vehicle suddenly.

After a while I became a high school student and we had rarely experienced blackouts. Thinking back now, it seems that Japan had rapidly escaped from the confusion after the war and the infrastructure had been improved.

I was an early bird from high-school student days to my early twenties. I did not dislike studying at school so I usually got up early in the morning to study school subjects. In the summer it was bright enough not necessary to turn on the lights, but from the autumn mouths to the winter the sunrise time was too late and dark, so I had to use the electric stand light.

Even though I could wake up early, I did not have a strong will power to wake up quickly in the dark. So I tried to make a device that would make me awake for sure in the dark. It was a timer type lighting device made by connecting the alarm clock and the electric stand. Then I managed to wake up as early as it was in summer, even earlier than my mother.

Thanks to that, I could wake up with the sound of the alarm clock first and at the same time it automatically became bright with the light. That made me able to start studying more reliably in winter time as well.

I remember making the same kind of the timer type lighting device again when I was working for Takatsuki laboratory of Toyobo Co., Ltd. in my twenties after graduating from high school.

This means the electricity is used only when it is needed and the device was the first automatic power saving type alarm device for lightening of my own making.