Bright minds see beyond barriers

Sheroes of eco bricks

Kedibone Tsiloane and Kekeletso Tsiloane, South Africa

Growing up in a construction family, it was almost inevitable that sisters Kedibone and Kekeletso Tsiloane would go into the business. Their childhood home is in Zamdela township, just outside Sasolburg in the far north of the Free State province. 

In 2013, when they had both matriculated, their father set up a small construction company for them, in the hope it would flourish into a powerful building business. Kedibone was working towards an auditing degree at the University of Pretoria, while Kekeletso studied part time and ran the business. However, the company found itself in financial difficulties, and the sisters looked at ways to cut costs. One of their biggest expenses was purchasing bricks, so they decided to make their own — which they did in their mother’s back yard. 

It was while working on these bricks that the idea for their invention was conceived. “My sister has been OCD about litter and pollution ever since I can remember,” laughs Kedibone. “Working in the yard, we started interacting with the waste collectors. We noticed that many of them were elderly women. We discovered that plastic recycling in particular gave them an income, and saw how for many of them it was the only way they could feed their grandchildren and themselves. We decided to play a part in helping them. It was then that we thought, ‘Why not use recycled plastic to make the bricks?” 

Kekeletso embarked on a journey to not only buy the plastic from the waste pickers, thereby supporting them, but also to alleviate the global problem of plastic pollution. Plastic bricks were her and Kedibone’s solution. 

By June 2017, the sisters had a product they were excited to put on the market. But their high spirits were short-lived. In 2018, they exhibited their invention at the African Construction Expo held in Johannesburg.

“We received a lot of negative feedback. It was constructive, but negative. People were asking valid questions such as ‘Will my house not burn down because the bricks are made of plastic?’”

The sisters were despondent. 

“At first, we believed the exhibition had been a waste of time and money. But then we thought about what the people had said. The public needed proof these bricks were the real deal. That exhibition made us realise that while you can invent something, there must be credibility that goes with the invention. Not all inventions need to be certified. However, product testing, development and research needed to go into our invention, not only for us, but so that our customers would feel confident about the product.”

Thus began the journey of product testing and certification. Through the testing came proof of just how brilliant their invention was. “The groundbreaking aspect of our technology is that we use non-recyclable plastic in making the Plasticbrick. We knew that using non-recyclable plastic would have a positive impact on the environment. However, we did not realise there would be other positive benefits. Our bricks are lighter than a normal brick, which makes transporting them more fuel-efficient — and this is both good for the environment and easier on the customer’s pocket.” 

Reinventing the potato

William Conan Davis (1926—2022), US

Indirectly, lovers of instant mashed potatoes have another African inventor, George Washington Carver, to thank for their favourite form of this popular carbohydrate. This is because, when William Conan Davis, the pioneer of instant mash, was a young boy, his father took him to a workshop hosted by George Washington Carver and Henry Ford at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Young William was so impressed with Carver that he was inspired to become a research scientist. Being an African American, the only university to accept him as a research-track graduate was the University of Idaho. Idaho is well known for its potato farming, but 63% of Americans do not like to cook their own spuds.

We received a lot of negative feedback. It was constructive, but negative. People were asking valid questions such as ‘Will my house not burn down because the bricks are made of plastic?

—  Kedibone and Kekeletso Tsiloane

In Idaho, he dug deep into the world of potatoes as part of his doctoral thesis. For his dissertation, he studied the process of sloughing, which is the breakdown of cells in potatoes. His study was focused on two industries: soup manufacturers and instant mash makers. The former required potatoes that sloughed at a slow rate, while the latter needed those that did so more rapidly. 

While working on his thesis, he landed a job during the summer holidays. He was hired by Washington State University to study the build-up of the sticky residue on saw blades at a lumber mill. The gummy substance was slowing down production at the mill, whose primary timber was the larch tree.

It was during this summer job that Davis succeeded in isolating the sticky matter — arabinogalactan. He dried it out to a powder and found that by adding water to it, it returned to a gummy paste. But there did not seem to be any specific use for arabinogalactans — until he returned to university and resumed working on his thesis.

Having reached a dead end in his thesis on how to create instant mash, he added the sticky arabinogalactans to the potato mixture. The marriage of the two was surprisingly successful, and Davis was able to develop methods that allowed for better sloughing, giving the instant mash a more appealing consistency. Similar methods were used to improve the consistency of fried chips as well as soft-serve ice cream.

An SA solution for an SA problem

Brian Gadisi, Alan Gie & Thembalethu Hadebe, South Africa

As those who work from home and use the internet well know, load-shedding negatively affects Wi-Fi and routers, which means they cannot work. Enter Brian Gadisi, Alan Gie and Thembalethu Hadebe.

Their story begins with the postgraduate diploma in entrepreneurship they had enrolled in at the University of Cape Town. One of their assignments was to devise a business model that would benefit ordinary people. It was 2019, and load-shedding had returned with a vengeance. “We were frustrated that, during load-shedding, it was impossible to access the internet through cellular data. The uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems on the market were unaffordable. We had to do something that would take away the frustration,” explains Gie.

Gadisi, Gie and Hadebe were toying with various ideas, and then one day, out of sheer frustration with load-shedding, the WiBox was born. The WiBox was perfect for the South African market. Affordable and compact, it allowed for seamless continuation of the internet when load-shedding kicked in.

The three funded the project with money generated from cake sales on their campus. They started small, selling the WiBox to fellow students, friends and family. Then in March 2020, lockdown level 5 and Covid-19 hit South Africa. Working life as we knew it would change forever.

Gadisi takes up the story: “We realised lockdown wasn’t going anywhere, and it was changing the way people worked. We decided to turn the WiBox into a real product. So in level 4 we applied for the letter to allow us to legally travel from our homes. We started working from a garage in Muizenberg and began selling the WiBox on Facebook.”

They knew they were onto something big. Once travel restrictions were eased during level 3, they held focus groups to improve their product. “We asked potential customers questions such as ‘How much are you prepared to pay?’ and ‘What features do you want?’”

A golden opportunity then appeared for them. A participant in one of their focus groups was the PA to the chief information officer (CIO) at Old Mutual. She told her boss about the invention, and he requested a presentation. Gadisi recalls that they were so nervous. They had never imagined WiBox would appeal to such a large organisation. Could this be their big break?

Despite slightly fumbling the presentation, the CIO was impressed. He offered them a spot on the Old Mutual’s vendors list, as he wanted the company to procure the WiBox for its staff working from home. However, the intrepid entrepreneurs hit a snag.

“At the time, a WiBox had to be delivered to a customer within four days of purchase, because the battery would be damaged if it wasn’t being charged. The buying department were not happy with us. They suggested we keep the WiBoxes and deliver them when they were needed. It was learning curve No 1. We went back and increased the battery shelf life of the product.” 

They realised that if such a big corporate was interested, other businesses would be too. They switched to a business-to-business model. Perseverance paid off, and they were the first group in their postgraduate programme to reach the R1m mark in six months. Their company, Arion Group, has moved into an office block in Cape Town and to date has sold more than 7,000 units and counting.

A godfather of the cellphone

Jesse Eugene RusselL, US

For many, a world without cellphones would be like one without oxygen. Yet it was only in the early 1990s that cellphones became a popular means of communication. For many years, it was up to people like Jesse Eugene Russell to invent the technology. 

Hand-held mobile radio telephones were first conceptualised at the turn of the last century. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for “a pocket-sized folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone”. After World War 2, countries began experimenting with portable telephones. These zero-generation (0G) devices (we are now on 5G) were not cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, and were expensive. The first hand-held cellphone was demonstrated by John F Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973. The handset weighed 2kg.

Meanwhile, a young Jesse Russell was growing up in the inner suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, in a family of 10 children. His focus at school was athletics, and it was only when he studied electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee, and then Stanford University, that his brilliance came to the fore. He became the first African American to be directly hired from a historically black university by AT&T Bell.

Cellphone technology was still in its infancy at the time. In those days, the communications industry was strongly divided between those who believed there was a future in digital technology and those who didn’t. It was in this polarised atmosphere that Russell found himself director of AT&T’s cellular telecommunications laboratory. His department was tasked with improving cellular radio technology.

In an interview conducted as part of the iAM Solutions series, Russell described those heady days. He had called a meeting with his team: “I knew nothing about cellular radio. The technology they [AT&T] didn’t want was a cellular radio system. AT&T had tried to sell cellular technology to telephone companies, and they sent it back to AT&T. My boss at the time said, ‘I know you don’t want this job as head of this group, but we believe the future is deeply rooted in this concept of cellular radio.’

“I called the meeting with all the managers. They were all white. I was the only black guy there. I remember asking, ‘What is the problem?’, because they were losing so much money. They said, ‘We can only make money when people are in their cars and answer their phones. Most of the time people are not in their cars.’ So I said, ‘Well, that seems like an easy problem to solve. Why not take the phone out the car and put it on the people?’ I was just thinking about making money, right? I said, ‘If you put the phone on the people, I guarantee you that every time it rings, they will grab the phone, and every time they grab the phone, we will make a dollar, right?’”

His team then told him of another problem they were facing. “They said the problem was that there were more people than cars. We had designed these [devices] for cars, not people. There was not enough spectrum (space on the car-phone airwaves) to put that many people on it.

“What my team didn’t know was that at the time I was one of the leading authorities in digital-signal processing. I said, ‘That is a simple problem to solve. We will simply digitise the speech, which will substantially reduce the amount of bandwidth used on a per-user basis.’ I described how you could do that and what modulation schemes you would need. I said, ’If you do the math on that, and I can show you how to do that, then you can get four times the number of people in the same amount of spectrum.’ It took us from 1984 to 1988, and we built the first digital cellular system any place in the world.”

“We took that business from $100m to $5bn simply because I challenged [things]. I had so much self-confidence I challenged the status quo — in the midst of all the stereotyping about African Americans, and in the midst of an all-white group.”

He pauses poignantly in the interview, and then says, “I remember speaking at a school during Black History Month and a sixth-grader asked me if I was a real inventor. I said, ‘Yes.’ She replied that she thought all black inventors were dead.”

• ‘We Were Always Here’ by Dr Candice Bailey, Lerato Makate, Sizwe Malinga, Les Owen and Therese Owen is published by TKO Publishing