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An Internet meme circulating in August 2016 touted the story of one William Kamkwamba, a Malawian teenager who taught himself how to build a windmill out of junk and bring power to his village. He then went on to build a second, larger windmill to power irrigation pumps. He did this all from books he read in the library. A note at the top of the image urged readers to Share this. Let's make him famous because the media won't. Apart from that last claim about the media not making him famous, the story is true. As reported everywhere from The Daily Times in Malawi to The Wall Street Journal to Time to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, William Kamkwamba dreamed of studying science as a child but was forced to drop out of school when famine struck Malawi in 2002, reducing his entire family to foraging for food to survive. Yet William refused to let go of his dreams, says the dust jacket of his autobiography (written with Bryan Mealer), The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, published in 2009: A more detailed description of Kamkwamba's feat of do-it-yourself engineering was provided by Malawi's Daily Times: The generator powered four electric lights and two radios in the Kamkwamba family's house, allowing them to stay up later and freeing them from having to travel long distances to purchase paraffin for lamps. A second windmill provided running water to irrigate crops. News of Kamkwamba's accomplishments spread rapidly, first throughout Malawi and then via the blogosphere, which garnered him international renown. He was invited as a guest to a TED conference in Tanzania in 2007, then received a scholarship to study at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, and with the help of an American sponsor attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 2014. He remains involved in many engineering and construction projects and charities in his home village of Dowa, Malawi.
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