A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS(see comment below)

I came to this same idea the other day after a conversation with a friend about phone service. She said a number of people she knows are switching away from a land line all together, they are instead using cell phones exclusively. That way, she continued, if the power went out you would still have a phone, and you can take your cell phone anywhere.

The problem with that idea is, traditional land lines use their own power source and are usually not affected by an outage, unless a storm, fire or vehicle accident takes out all lines. Furthermore, a cell phone requires a charger, that must be plugged in to keep the phone in use. Now if you had one of those hand crank generators on the cell phone, you could do away completely, with the need of electricity for your phone forever.

No replacement batteries or trade in batteries, which would require access and or travel to get them.

All you would need is the subscription to the service and the phone.

At this point it becomes an electrical engineering problem. Is it technically possible to add a crank generator to a cell phone and keep the size of the phone down to what the general public would prefer to use, because bottom line, it must be a marketable idea that most everyone would be comfortable using or the idea will die before ever going into production.

Think of it, you could be anywhere within range of a cell tower and be able to make a call without having to remember to charge your phone. When camping, traveling, bicycling, hiking, backpacking, boating, its a huge advantage to know you never have to worry if you forgot to charge your battery or did you remember to bring your charger with you.

We have become used to being in instant contact with our world when we want to not when we really need to.

I admit I resisted the idea of getting a cell phone years ago, but my wife convinced me that in an emergency we would want to contact each other, and since we live in a pretty rural area it is a good idea to get in touch with each other ASAP when an emergent situation should arise.

Back to the idea at hand, I would like to find that this crank generator could be detachable much like a charger is now. Use it then stow it, with some kind of charge meter built into the phone with a low charge tone much like the phones are now.

Heck, why not an after market hand crank generator that could be adapted to any number of different cell phone makes and models!

Where is that electrical engineer when we need him/her?

Thanks for reading, Keith H