Max Whisson began his working life as an apprentice in an aeroplane manufacturing factory in Melbourne more than 70 years ago. He soon changed to train as a doctor and has spent most of his life doing fundamental biological research and practising clinical medicine. He remained fascinated by many aspects of engineering and physics and was a compulsive inventor, holding many patents. In the last 12 years he has been concerned about how Earth, our only planet so far, would cope with the increasing demands of an ever growing human population. How to get the huge amount of electricity and also the clean water that all the world's people need, and to do this without making life difficult for the myriad of other creatures, especially the trees, birds and animals. He began designing and testing a range of wind turbines and soon concluded that vertical axis turbines with between 8 and 10 blades, with precise shapes and angles determined by experimental testing, were the way forward. They were efficient in horizontal wind in any direction, started up in the tiniest breeze and produced almost no noise or vibration. The next problem was though that people need electricity at all sorts of times, day and night, wind or no wind. So, Max looked into solar power and saw that good progress was being made with steadily improving methods of producing electricity. BUT, there remained one big problem: neither the wind nor the sun provide power throughout the 24 hours that people want electricity. Batteries? Well, yes, but expensive often bulky and need replacing every few years. So Max came up with a seemingly very old technique: just let water from a high tank flow down through a pipe to a hydro-turbine to produce electricity whenever required and use solar and wind power whenever available to pump the water up again. Max came up with quite a few ways of doing this but as he sees it many variations could be developed to suit different regions, environments and community needs. He says that all the ideas he proposes should be regarded as "open source" but he simply would like to be recognised for any ideas that people find interesting and helpful.
