From the spark of an idea, Noel Gauthier hopes to release a firestorm in the fight against world poverty and its risks.
Gauthier, a graduate student in the University of Cincinnati's industrial design program, took a homework assignment a step further, resulting in FireStop, a low-cost, environmentally responsible fire extinguisher to fight fires in urban slums around the world.
"Our assignment was to create a more ergonomic fire extinguisher," Gauthier says, "but as I looked into it, in most places these days there are sprinkler systems and fire retardant materials. In those places, you don't need a fire extinguisher. So I started to look at where extinguishers are needed."
He soon figured out that low-income housing with dense populations, especially in poorer countries, is where they needed extinguishers the most and set about developing a low-cost solution instead.
FireStop is a one-button system that is made of easily manufactured plastic parts and a cardboard tube, filled with a simple fire retardant compound. Gauthier figures each extinguisher would take $1 to make.
Along with being affordable, Gauthier says he wanted to make FireStop so simple that populations protected by it could also manufacture the extinguisher, eventually turning it into an exportable product and helping fight poverty that's part of the problem to start with.
Others soon saw the value of Gauthier's idea. Last year, FireStop took the $5,000 third prize in the commercialization category of Cincinnati Innovates, a contest to recognize entrepreneurial ideas. Also, the local law firm of Taft, Stettinius and Hollister aided Gauthier by filing FireStop's patent application on a pro bono basis.
Gauthier and his team are working on the final engineering specs for FireStop, which he hopes will be ready to start production by spring. In the meantime, while he's finishing his degree, he's also launched his own design firm, UMi Design and Development. And he's set his sights on FireStop's successor � similarly simple-design alternatives to expensive medical devices.
Source: Noel L. Gauthier, UMi Design and Development
Writer: Dave Malaska