Our prize winner pumps up his effort

The Sunday Times
June 14, 2009

Tom Smith is still fighting for his dream after winning our £100,000 competition

Rachel Bridge

It has been a rollercoaster ride for Tom Smith since he won our Sunday Times One Minute Pitch competition four years ago. Back then, Smith, a Cambridge PhD, so impressed our panel of judges with his plans for a low-cost solar pump to help farmers in the developing world irrigate their crops that they unanimously decided he should be awarded the £100,000 prize.
His pump, which uses readily available heat sources, including sunshine, to provide energy to lift water from under the ground, was chosen from thousands of entries by Sunday Times readers.
Each of them had one minute to persuade our judges — who included Sir Tom Hunter, the entrepreneur, and Allan Leighton, Post Office chairman at the time – that their business idea deserved to secure the prize.
In the four years since walking away with the £100,000 cheque, Smith has come tantalisingly close to grasping his dream, but the downturn in the housing market has sent him temporarily crashing back to earth. The experience has left him older and wiser, but more determined than ever to turn his dream into reality.
Born in Cambridge and brought up in Haddenham, a small village in the Fens, Smith spent his childhood creating things, including model aircraft and a tree house. “I have always had an inventive spirit,” he said.
After leaving school he spent eight months in the Andes at an experimental farm that was trying to revive ancient farming techniques. It was here that he found an interest in agriculture in the developing world.
He returned to study physics at Imperial College London, and part-way through his course came up with the idea for his pump while on holiday in Paris.
“I was staying in a flat high up in a building and it was incredibly hot. I thought it must be possible to use some of the energy beating down on the roof to cool down the room. So I started to think about ways in which you can expand and contract fluids in pipes using temperature differences,” he said.
After winning our competition, Smith decided to focus on developing a commercial application for his pump in the shape of a more energy-efficient way of circulating hot water in domestic central-heating systems. He hoped that the revenue from this would be able to sustain his primary vision, the irrigation pump.
Everything went to plan at first. Smith found a partner for the project, Christos Markides, and they formed a company called Thermofluidics.
Cambridge University offered them the use of a laboratory for two years at a peppercorn rent to develop the central-heating aspect.
As a result, Smith managed to attract the interest of a large American industrial engineering company that wanted to help him take the project further. Thrilled, he spent a year negotiating a licensing deal and collaboration agreement.
In April last year, however, disaster struck. The American firm pulled out, citing the downturn in the construction market and leaving Smith back at square one. “We were negotiating with them for a long time and plugged all our efforts into that,” he said.
“The American company axed a whole load of projects and we were one of them. It was a big blow. We put too many eggs in that one basket because we believed that it was a sure basket.”
Smith tried to find another commercial partner, but by this time the recession had caused other firms to abandon research and development projects.
Smith could easily have given up, but he was still determined to push ahead with his solar pump, knowing the huge difference it would make to farmers in the developing world.
So after reassessing the situation, he and Markides are in the process of splitting their roles, with Markides taking over the development of the central-heating application and Smith putting all his efforts into developing his solar pump. “I decided that it was going to be now or never,” he said.
Last summer Smith moved to Devon, where Exeter University has made him an honorary fellow and is providing him with a laboratory and a place on the roof of the physics department to test the solar panels for the pump.
He is now putting together engineering drawings for a preproduction prototype and has identified several agricultural sites in the surrounding area where he will be able to do field trials.
Smith still has £50,000 of the £100,000 he won in our competition and is in the process of applying for more grants – helped by his ability to provide matched funding – in the hope of getting the pump into full commercial production in 2012.
It has been a long journey. Now 31, Smith has been working towards his dream for almost nine years, having in effect worked unpaid for all that time.
“It is pretty frustrating, especially when about 18 months ago things really looked as though they were going to take off in a big way,” he said.
“I thought it would happen a lot more quickly. But I am still solvent and I am still doing this and I have no plans to stop. Things could be a lot worse. If it weren’t for The Sunday Times prize, I would have to have given up a long time ago.”
He is still confident he will eventually achieve his goal. “Six months ago I wasn’t at all optimistic, but now I am quite hopeful that things will come together. I still believe it will happen,” he said.

HOW IT WORKS:

THE pump Tom Smith has developed is powered by the sun so it can be used in places that do not have electricity. And because it has no moving parts or precision components, it can be produced cheaply. Smith hopes that, once it goes into production, each one will cost about £50 to make.
The pump uses liquids and gases that expand and contract due to temperature differences. This can create enough pressure to raise water from underground.