Leftovers

Leftovers sometimes lead to interesting and creative new types of food.

One of my favorites of this type of invention is fried rice. People living in China during the Sui dynasty around 1500 years ago came up with the perfect way to prevent throwing leftover rice and other food away.

I grew up eating shepherd’s pie as a kid, which made similar use of leftover mashed potatoes, beans, and meat (among any other things you needed to throw in there). Croutons came about as a way to save leftover bread, and quiche was designed to salvage eggs.

What about other things that are left over? Is it possible to take the same innovative repurposing of something you don’t need for the main task at hand? What else can you do with leftovers?

In the 1980s, two engineers at the Franco-German GSM cooperation named Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert realized that leftover space could be extremely useful.

Cell phones divide the available radio frequency spectrum into channels so that more info can be sent at once. These channels are a little bit like highway lanes, where each “car” is like a packet of information. Each packet needs a little space on its own channel to avoid interference.

Voice channels carry all the phone conversations, and signaling channels carry the behind-the-scenes information that makes a cell network work, like transferring a call between two cell towers as a person moves around, or locating a phone when a call comes in.

Hillebrand and Ghillebaert realized that there was some space on the signaling channel they could put to good use. Although the channel wasn’t always empty, there were little moments where you could send a short burst of data “into the lane”—if a packet of info is like a car, you just had to wait for an opening on the highway.

They realized that a small amount—first envisioned as 128 bytes of data, but later modified to a modest 160 characters of text—could avoid interfering with the core signaling functions of the network, yet would be long enough to convey a useful message.

Leftover space is a novel idea. Leftover energy is another.

Crude oil has been sought after by humans for thousands of years, but it was only in the mid 1800s that it became practical to drill for oil (as opposed to finding oil by accident while digging a well, for instance).

What fueled this boom was the need for artificial light, a quest that’s likely as old as humans. Decades before the light bulb was ready to be sold to consumers, kerosene was the hot technology of the day. Producers like John Rockefeller couldn’t make enough of the stuff to keep up with demand.

Unfortunately, there was a nasty byproduct called gasoline. This substance was volatile and flammable, unlike its slower burning cousin, kerosene. At first, refineries would simply burn off the extra gasoline, or dump it in a river.

The value of gasoline skyrocketed with the advent of the mass production of cars.

Leftovers are all over, everywhere. We live in a society where there is a great deal of waste, and waste can cause a lot of problems.

Fortunately, waste can also lead to novel solutions and innovations that can change the world for the better.

For today, help me think about two things:
What’s an area where there is a lot of waste today, where we need to see some innovation? And, what’s another example of innovative leftovers? Let’s think!