where he graduated with a degree in photojournalism. He'd come a long, circuitous way from high school science class, but his desire for an off-the-grid power source brought him full circle. He found his old science project while searching theough his step-mother's garage and realized, if he could expand the model, it could keep weed growers off the radars of local law enforcement.
The realization propelled him on a new journey, this time through the internet, where he examined turbines and questioned experts. After some research, he rigged a pulley system to turn a turbine, but the generator kept growing larger and larger. This was a problem because he wanted people to be able to purchase it and take it home in the trunk of their cars.
Eventually, Farland met a man in Trinity County who was selling a grandfather clock he'd built in his garage. Opening the clock, the man revealed a gearing system that ran on self-sustaining, kinetic energy. Invigorated and inspired by the self-powered gearing system, Farland returned to the drawing board. He wanted his generator to work like the clock. The ideal model would use a pendulum, just like the timepiece in Trinity.
With the help of a college friend who'd majored in engineering, as well as a gearing system Farland found in the pages of Popular Science, he created a model that generates power through full revolutions of a weighted arm.
The Hoover Dam generates power from falling water that moves a turbine, creating static electricity. Farland’s idea would work in a similar way, but rather than harnessing the water's
When Farland was a teenager, his sister named him 'Deep thought' - D.T. for short, after reading Douglas Adams' A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. She says Farland reminds her of the supercomputer in Adams' novel, the one that eventually anounces life's meaning. Farland's own answer lies in his journey rather than life's destination.
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Farland's journey as an engineer began with a high school science project - a simple generator - in 1998. After graduating high school at 16, he tossed the project in a box, filed for emancipation, and hitchhiked around the country. He toured the west coast from San Diego to Seattle, and his love of the journey took him as far south as New Orleans.
After he turned 18, he returned to California to scrape together the money to pay for college. An unscrupulous car salesman derailed Farland's plan. Though the seller wrote a letter of sale and signed over the pink slip, the car, unbeknownst to Farland, had been stolen.
Sitting on the yellow divider, Farland explains. Police pulled him over, and although he tried to prove his overnership with the pink slip, the document turned out to be a fake. "The people who reported the car stolen knew the law," Farland says with a resigned shrug. Seagulls spy his bag of lunch, land, and amble about, begging for discards. Farland pauses to regard them, light brown eyes beneath heavy lids. "I went to prison."
When Farland paroled, he worried he wouldn't succeed after society had deemed him a failure. Despite his ddoubts, Farland attended Santa Monica College and later transferred to UCLA,
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