Julia Silverman and Jessica Matthews first began thinking about the power of a soccer ball for a college project. Challenged to come up with a solution to a problem facing the world, they focused on the lack of access to electricity in developing countries. Their imaginary solution was a soccer ball that harnessed kinetic energy from play and transformed it to electrical energy to power an LED lamp.
Little did Silverman and Matthews know that 3,000 of those electricity-generating soccer balls would eventually be delivered to Mexico, Haiti, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and South Africa. This is a pretty incredible story: