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This Issue 09/15/2005

Also in this issue

• Freshman Superlatives
• Word on the street: Back to the Future
• Schuylkill Sushi

And going out there means Sam had to do on-the-ground research with Josh in Afghanistan, Thailand, Cambodia and Croatia -- all countries where landmines affect the way that people go about their daily business.

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The idea for the landmine removal device came five years earlier in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Josh -- the current head of design development at Humanistic Robotics -- was working at a furniture-making facility.

Josh is a Jeff Spicoli-look alike. He has a goatee and wears wooden beaded necklaces that he makes himself. He had just graduated as a Sustainable Architecture concentrator, an interdisciplinary degree he designed himself at Hampshire College, a small, liberal-arts college with no curriculum and no majors. He decided to become a woodworker. And one day, he took a trip to Croatia where he saw people who looked slightly different than the people in America.

Croatia is one of several countries in Europe which has a major landmine problem, from the Balkan war in the 1990s. Josh would walk down the street and notice a guy missing an arm, a leg or an eye. All he could think about was how to fix it.

As Sam put it, "he sees all these people with limbs blown off ... so he thought, 'What if there was some way to detonate mines by rolling over them?'"

Josh sat on that idea for a couple of years but didn't really do anything with it -- after all, it's hard to start a business without a background in the field. He moved to New York to start an industrial design graduate degree at the Pratt School of Design when he watched the planes strike the World Trade Center. He thought, "Oh my God, I could die tomorrow, I better be doing something interesting with my life." He started to work on things useful to people with real problems. He just had no idea how to sell them.

He met Sam at a lunch his father dragged him to and realized that the two could work well together. It clicked for Sam as well. "We could make something together with our complementary skill sets," he says. "It was a long evolution of 'I don't want to do I-banking, starting a business would be cool too,' to meeting Josh, to thinking 'we have mental synergy,' to deciding an idea for a month, recalibrating, kicking around ideas for an entire Saturday and then landing on landmines."

At first glance, the landmine demining prototype sitting in the glass lobby of Penn's Weiss Tech House looks more like a tractor on steroids. Which is, in fact, partially true.

When it was time to build the prototype, Josh went on eBay and bought tractor chains. He and Sam learned several little things. "Don't put the chains on the outside of the wheels, that kind of stuff," Josh says. He rigged the chains to a Plexiglass chasse after teaching himself how to use the laser cutting machine. Then he attached the weights -- each roughly 40 pounds -- to the front of the chasse so that they interlocked and formed a tight weave.