The iconic red telephone boxes go green in London.
The famous and iconic red public telephone booths in London to go green very soon. The green telephone booths will be fitted with solar powered mobile chargers that will be carbon-emission free. The idea and technology is credited to two young students from the London School of Engineering, London. The green telephone has been named “Solarbox”. The solar powered mobile charger can charge mobile phones, tablets, cameras, laptops and a wide range of other devices.
The first “Solarbox” was installed in Tottenham Court Road on Wednesday, October 1, 2014 and is open to public use.
Living in a time when no person is without a mobile phone, the iconic red public pay-phones were being rendered useless. The UK government will gauge the response that the first Solarbox gets and then begin replacing the red booths with these from January 2015 onwards.
The technology is invented by Harold Craston and Kristy Kenney, who won £5000 funding for the project. The project won the funding at the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson’s 2014 Low Carbon Entrepreneur competition held in this summer.
Talking about how the idea came, Craston said, “I lived next to a phone box in my second year at [university] and walked past it every day. There are 8,000 of these lying unused in London and we must be able to find a use for them.”
At the launch of the Solarbox, Mayor Johnson used the Solarbox to charge his phone, which was dying.
