Ganguli is writer Sunil Gangopadhyay’s grandson.
AB Wire
Oyon Ganguli, a 9-year-old third-grader at Fitzgerald Elementary School, from Waltham, Massachusetts, recently won the Mighty Minds Contest – a national youth inventors competition jointly run by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and Camp Invention, a youth educational summer camp – for a prototype of a shower that filters and recycles water, and which he calls “The Cleaner.”
For his winning effort, Ganguli will spend two days in Washington D.C. at the National Inventors Hall of Fame, where he’ll get to meet some of the brightest minds in the country. Ganguli will be included in the ceremony when 16 new inductees are welcomed into the Hall of Fame. Some of this year’s honorees include the inventors of electronic ink and pioneers of the Internet.
Before the Mighty Minds contest, Ganguli entered his shower prototype made out of recycled materials into the Fitzgerald science fair with his friend Mateo Rosado. During research, the two discovered that the product already exists, but that didn’t stop Ganguli from dreaming, reported WicketLocal.com.
In an interview to Waltham News Tribune, Ganguli explained how his invention works.
“When someone takes a shower, the water goes down the drain and through the pipe before it reaches a filter with three layers: gravel, sand and charcoal. The water, which is now clean and filtered, sits in a storage tank before it gets pumped back up to the bathtub. Because over time, the filter gets clogged, there will be a little door to make sure you get access to the filter,” he said.
Asked how did he come up with the idea, Ganguli explained that when he watched an ALS ice bucket challenge video with a guy sitting under a backhoe full of water and it dumped it all on him, he realized it was a waste of water.
“After talking about water waste with my mom, we found out that a 10-minute shower wastes 50 gallons of water. I forgot about it until the science fair when Mateo and I did research on the charcoal and everything. Before that, I had an idea for it to work with sponges and pistons,” he said.
‘The Cleaner’ was made inside a strawberry box which held three layers of cleaning material- gravel, sand and charcoal. He took help from his friend Mateo Rosado for the filtering process.
Ganguli, who is Bengali novelist and Sahitya Akademi award-winner Sunil Gangopadhyay’s grandson claims that he was so excited about his win that ‘he ended up running circles around the kitchen and backyard for 20 minutes,’ reported Business Insider.
Even though the invention can be expensive, Ganguli is confident that it will save the government from spending more money to get water apart from reducing one’s water bill.
Ganguli is already working on another idea, called the ‘Space Cleaner’- which is a solar-powered robot whose one arm melts space junk and the other vacuums up the melted liquid.
The idea for this came to Ganguli while he was watching Apollo 13 with his parents and thought to himself, “What happens to everything that’s flying off the ship into space?”
He also has big dreams for when he grows up. “When I grow up, I want to be one of three things- work at Lego, be an inventor or work for Mojang (the company that develops Minecraft),” he said in an interview.