SHINE A LIGHT

The driving personalities behind
LIGHT UP THE WORLD

By Alexandra Venter

Ever since his 1997 visit to the dimly lit homes and schools of Nepalese villagers, Dave Irvine-Halliday has been determined to bring efficient lighting to the developing world.

Irvine-Halliday, a University of Calgary professor and photonics engineer, is also the visionary founder of Light Up the World (LUTW), a non-profit organization that provides safe, affordable, and environmentally sound lighting systems where they are most needed.

LUTW also teaches local groups how to install, use and repair the lamps, which currently use solar-powered batteries to run ultra-efficient white light emitting diodes, or WLEDs. Much like their lamps, LUTW depends on people with energy, people to make the circuitry work, and someone to light the way.

The Man with the Bright Idea

One day while his parents were out, the then 13-year-old Dave Halliday decided to repair a burnt out light bulb. Perhaps it was his Scottish nature, he says, that compelled him to punch holes in the glass bulb, rewire the element, and turn the light on, resulting in an explosion that blinded him for about an hour.

Undeterred—or perhaps inspired—by his light bulb moment, Irvine-Halliday would become an expert in fibre optics and photonics engineering, and the visionary behind Light Up the World.

How did the son of a Scottish foundry labourer and jute mill worker end up in Calgary, mentoring young engineers and putting together WLED lamps to take to the developing world? Irvine-Halliday says that growing up next door to England as a Scot with a funny accent, all his life he has identified with the underdog.

He also considers himself very lucky. As a young man he was knocked off his motorcycle by a drunk driver. A few years later, while climbing on Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain, he slipped and broke his leg. He recovered and returned to climbing—still one of his greatest pleasures—only to be caught in an avalanche in Chamonix. His neck was broken in two places. Lying in a hospital bed for three months, partially paralyzed, Irvine-Halliday says he recognized how fragile life is. As a friend commented, “The Almighty must be keeping you for something! ”

“ Life is a whole series of serendipitous occasions,” says Irvine-Halliday. After studying telecommunications engineering at the University of Dundee and then the University of Aberdeen, he was ready to take a job in Switzerland. When he learned that immigration would not allow his wife, Jenny, and their 18-month-old daughter, Rachel, to join him for a year, he had another idea. During his stay at a Swiss hostel, he had met some people from Edmonton. “You fancy going to Canada?” he asked Jenny. After a moment of silence, she agreed.

They spent three months in Ottawa, in debt and unemployed, before he finally landed a position as an electrical engineer with Bell-Northern Research in Ottawa. He joined the systems department and soon became the resident expert in digital switching. After four years, he had an opportunity to join AGT in Edmonton, “the most dynamic telephone company in Canada.” Here Irvine-Halliday was introduced to a state-of-the art technology that used light to efficiently transmit information over long distances —a technology called fibre optics.

Although he was hired as a systems engineer, he was also asked to give a couple of seminars. They went well, and he started giving training courses to company engineers on a regular basis. “I didn’t know it,” he says, “but it was the start of my teaching career. ”

The family would move back to Scotland, and then to Australia, before Irvine-Halliday became an associate professor of engineering at the University of Calgary, in 1983. He was, for 20 years, the only professor who taught the fibre optics course. Today, as a result of his University Professorship, he is delighted to teach his favourite subject, Solid State Lighting for Human Development.

“ He enjoys it when you do something well, and when you make a mistake he encourages you to learn from it,” says graduate student Rodolfo Peon. Fellow student Ganesh Doluweera agrees. “He gives us the support to develop our own skills and ideas,” says Doluweera, “It is a privilege to work with him. ”

It was during his 1997 sabbatical in Nepal, stunned by the darkness of the villagers’ homes and schools, that Irvine-Halliday realized how he could use his engineering knowledge to transform lives. “That was the moment of conception [of LUTW],” he says. “I didn’t know it, but my whole family ’s life was about to change.”

Back in Canada, he developed a lighting system that would run on renewable energy and use ultra-efficient, hardy, light emitting diodes as a light source. “We spent over a year trying to make white lights with diodes,” he says, “and it didn’t work well!” However, when he was surfing the Internet one day, he found that a Japanese researcher, Shuji Nakamura, had invented a functional WLED. By 1999, the WLEDs were available and Irvine-Halliday was able to incorporate them into his lighting systems. Then, he, Jenny, and their son, Gregor, headed out to Nepal with their backpacks full of lamps.

“ My original goal was to light up one million lives by the end of 2005,” says Irvine-Halliday. He may be short of this goal, but thanks to the dedication of a five-person staff and two volunteers, LUTW will have almost 10,000 lighting systems up and running in homes, orphanages and schools in 25 countries before the year is out. He notes that without Ken Robertson and other solid supporters at the U of C, LUTW Foundation would not exist in its current form.

Irvine-Halliday has been recognized with the Rolex Award for Enterprise (2002) and the Canadian Governor General Meritorious Service Medal (2005) among other awards. He has met with the Prime Minister of India and was named the Reader’s Digest Canadian Hero of the Year in 2004.
He still has the feeling that he hasn’t accomplished as much as he’d like to. “I go to bed thinking about LUTW, I wake up thinking about LUTW,” he admits. “The other day Jenny said, ‘can’t we talk about something else? ’”

He smiles. “I’m living my dream.”

Charging the Batteries
of a Sustainable Organization

“ I’ve always been an adventuresome type—despite being the finance guy in a bank,” says Ken Robertson, the quietly passionate Chief Operating Officer of LUTW. In 1999, Robertson had left behind a successful career in banking to pursue a master’s in the U of C’s environmental design program when in 2001 he heard Dave Irvine-Halliday interviewed on the radio. “I realized this fellow had a compelling story. He had a liberating technology,” says Robertson. He also recognized that Irvine-Halliday needed a business model that could take LUTW to “the next level.”

Excited about the possibilities, Robertson contacted Irvine-Halliday. In the Spring of 2001 they got together, and a few beers later LUTW had its first Canadian volunteer.

Robertson thought that LUTW would be the perfect topic for his thesis on developing a sustainable non-profit organization. He was right. And although, as he confesses, he has put writing his thesis on hold, since signing on as a LUTW Foundation founder, Robertson has overseen its growth from a family’s mission of backpack philanthropy to a sustainable organization with multiple international projects on the go each year.

“ I count myself as very fortunate meeting Dave,” says Robertson. “I got to a level in banking where I could move forward and have a well-remunerated career … but I realized this was not my personal mission.” Like the Irvine-Hallidays, Robertson drew on his personal savings until LUTW became financially viable. It was worth it, he says because of his gut feeling that they could make a difference. “I just knew that we were on to a very affordable, appropriate technology that could really change how we view energy and lighting in the developing the world. ”

In the early 1990s, Robertson took an extended leave of absence to work and volunteer in Guyana and Venezuela. During his time in South America he helped develop a nature reserve for giant otters, conducted herpetological surveys to keep track of endangered frogs and established an adventure tourism group with the Guyanese military.

Later, when he was enrolled at the U of C and was working with Professor Karim-Aly Kassam, a research associate with the university’s Arctic Institute, Robertson discovered that his “most engaging work was mapping indigenous (environmental) knowledge.” To conduct this research he had to bring together his knowledge of economics and environmental science, and his experience working with indigenous communities— excellent preparation as it turned out, for his work with LUTW.

Today Robertson says he’s happy to be using his business training for “work that feels like it’s part of my soul.”