High Tech! Americans Invent T-Shirt That Can charge Your Cellphone

The era of PHCN and a pass my neighbour generator will soon be over has the latest technology that will keep your mobile phone batteries (and your connectedness) fully charged is the humble T-shirt. A smarty-pants pair at the University of South Carolina has stitched together a way to make your cotton top work for you. Basically, they soaked a dime-store T-shirt in fluoride, and baked it in an oxygen-deprived oven.

This converted the cotton’s cellulose particles into activated carbon — which is essentially a capacitor, the basic building block of all electrical items. In this state, the shirt will store a bunch of electricity.