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Solar-Powered Lamp Finds Place in History

What would you pick if you had to tell the history of humankind in 100 objects? Curators of the British Museum took up that challenge for a British radio program that highlighted items from the museum's exhaustive collection. In November they released a book in the United States with photos of things like the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and the chronometer from the HMS Beagle. The 100th item in the chronology — chosen to represent the 21st century's ingenuity and challenges — is a solar-powered lamp, illustrated by a photo of the D.light S200, an LED lantern and solar charger that grew out of a 2006 class at Stanford.

"Solar power, thanks to low-cost lighting and power kits like the one I've chosen, is changing lives in many parts of the world," said museum director Neil MacGregor. The book, The History of the World in 100 Objects, doesn't name the D.light product photographed, but it salutes the general technology of a portable solar panel and small LED (light-emitting diode) for improving upon expensive, unhealthy kerosene, especially in poor, rural areas not reached by an electrical grid.

That was the assignment given to students in 2006 for the class Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, by professors Jim Patell of the Graduate School of Business and Adam French and David Kelley of the School of Engineering. Students who eventually founded D.light, include Sam Goldman, MBA '07, who is now the company's CEO; classmate Ned Tozun, company president; and Erica Estrada-Liou, then a mechanical engineering student but now an MBA student at the Graduate School of Business.

The course in 2012 is taught by Patell, David Beach, Stuart Coulson, Julian Gorodsky, and David Janka.