Ann Makosinski: The Flashlight That Needs No Batteries
A friend in the Philippines was failing school because there was no electricity at home to study by after dark. That single fact, relayed to a teenager in Saanich, British Columbia, became the seed of a flashlight that runs on nothing but the warmth of a human hand.
A Childhood at the Soldering Iron
Makosinski, who is of Filipino and Polish descent, grew up in Saanich, near Victoria, British Columbia. Her father, a retired lab manager who holds two medical patents, gave her an early comfort with tools and circuits; she was soldering circuits by age nine and entering science fairs from sixth grade onward. That home environment, more than any classroom, shaped the instinct that would eventually produce her signature invention.
The Hollow Flashlight
At fifteen, Makosinski built what became known as the Hollow Flashlight: a thermoelectric device that converts body heat directly into light using Peltier tiles, with a hollow tube design that increases convection currents and widens the temperature differential the tiles need to generate current. It requires no batteries, no external charging, and no sunlight, only the warmth of a palm wrapped around the tube. The device won her the Google Science Fair in 2013, along with a win at the Intel Science and Engineering Fair and a gold medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair the same year. Time magazine put her on its 30 Under 30 list before she had finished high school.
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →Life After the Prize
The Hollow Flashlight made Makosinski a fixture of the youth-invention circuit. In 2014 she appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, receiving $5,000 toward her education. In 2016 Popular Science named her its Young Inventor of the Year, she received a $50,000 Quest Climate Grant, and Uniqlo signed her as a global brand ambassador. Forbes added her to its own 30 Under 30 list in 2017, and in 2018 she collected four major awards from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and was named Glamour magazine's College Woman of the Year, the same year manufacturers began negotiating with her about commercial production of the flashlight.
A Second Invention: The eDrink
Makosinski followed the flashlight with the eDrink, a coffee mug that captures the excess heat of a hot beverage and converts it into electricity capable of charging a phone, tablet, or pair of headphones. Like the flashlight, it worked on the thermoelectric principle of turning a temperature gradient into current. Unlike the flashlight, it never reached a commercial market, a reminder that a working science-fair prototype and a manufacturable consumer product are not the same thing. She later founded Makotronics Enterprises to house her inventions and has filed multiple patents through it.
Choosing Literature Over Engineering
Rather than pursuing an engineering degree, Makosinski studied English Literature, first at the University of British Columbia from 2015 to 2018 and later completing a BA in the subject at the University of Victoria in 2021. In between she trained at the Herbert Berghof Studios acting school in New York in 2019. The pivot from inventor to English and acting student complicates the easy narrative of a born engineer on a straight-line career; her own choices suggest someone whose interests migrated well beyond the circuit board that made her famous.
The Talk Circuit
Makosinski has delivered multiple TEDx talks, in Richmond and in Vancouver, and has appeared in outlets including CNN, which profiled her alongside other young inventors working on green-energy toys. Her public identity has remained tied almost entirely to the two devices she built as a teenager, even as her own path has moved toward the humanities and performance.
Why Ann Is Called a Genius
The genius label attached to Makosinski is really a genius label attached to a specific piece of applied physics: recognizing that a hollow tube shape would improve convection enough to make a thermoelectric flashlight viable off body heat alone, then actually building and refining it as a young teenager without a lab or formal engineering training. That is inventive intuition and hands-on tinkering skill, honed since age nine, rather than theoretical brilliance; she did not discover a new physical principle, she applied an existing one, the Peltier effect, more cleverly than adults building similar devices had. No named scientist or publication in the record explicitly calls her a "genius"; the label comes from a media apparatus built around prodigy narratives and prize lists like Time's 30 Under 30. The honest counter-case is that her adult life has moved away from invention altogether, toward literature and acting, and that her second invention, the eDrink, never became a real product. What she demonstrated at fifteen was genuine engineering creativity under constraint; what followed was more a career built on that one moment than a sustained record of further breakthroughs.
Legacy
Makosinski's name is now shorthand for a certain kind of teenage-inventor story, the kid who solves a real-world energy-poverty problem with a garage-built prototype and a science-fair table. Whatever she does next, the Hollow Flashlight remains the fixed point by which she is known.
