The Torch Fire Detection Sensor
An alarm that uses infrared cameras to detect wildfires
I have an investor friend in London with technology-guru credentials going back 40 years.
In 1985, he was excited about an unlikely-sounding new company called Microsoft. In 1992, he believed that, one day, we would drive our cars guided by a satellite system called G.P.S. In 1996, he predicted that a new form of super-fast Internet, D.S.L., which worked on regular phone lines, would replace dial-up. In 1998, he e-mailed me about something he’d discovered called Wi-Fi, which he insisted was going to be big.
I sat up and paid attention, then, when that friend’s son, who was about 12 years old when I last spoke with him, popped up two weeks ago as the very much grown-up C.O.O. of a San Francisco tech start-up called Torch, which is about to bring to market a consumer smart sensor for wildfires. Bearing in mind his family’s track record of backing winners, I suspect Torch is going to spread like … well, you know.
Torch is built to detect the very beginnings of a wildfire or an ember spark-up from as far as 100 yards away and to notify your phone. This typically happens within three minutes, says the company, as compared with rival wildfire-detection systems, which can take 30 minutes to several hours to sound the alarm. One solar-powered, user-installed Torch sensor can keep watch over an area of up to 10 acres.
Torch senses three separate indicators of fire—heat, light, and airborne chemicals—using infrared cameras, gas sensors, and a spectral-analysis camera, all working 24-7 to identify the problem at its very earliest stage. The Torch team was testing the almost finished version of the product through the January Los Angeles fires and is now offering free Torch units to applicants in select fire-threatened areas of L.A. Torch will be on general sale later in the year, across the world, probably at around $200 with a $30 to $50 monthly subscription.
The product claims to be unique, and it also has a great backstory. Its inventor is 25-year-old Vasya Tremsin, who made the first prototype as a high-school science project after he had seen the 2017 Napa Valley fires burn down entire communities and leave the air smoky for weeks.
Tremsin, whose Uzbekistan-born dad, Anton Tremsin, is a Moscow University–trained physicist and sensor expert with the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, took Torch to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair that year and won one of the top prizes.
“My dad is basically a science genius,” he said by Zoom. “I had been doing science-fair projects with him since eighth grade. Every year, we’d build some kind of invention to solve a real-world problem. A device for people with hearing disabilities, something to detect soil moisture, these kinds of things. Torch was my senior-year project.”
After winning the Intel competition, he studied computer science and economics (U.C. Berkeley and University of Pennsylvania, respectively) while finding investors for Torch.
One of the many clever things about the product is that it’s not just independently powered by its built-in solar panel but can work without Wi-Fi or a cell connection, using instead what’s called LoRa radio to connect to the Helium “Internet of things” network, which is less vulnerable to damage or power outages since the radio cells can be located far from the fire-affected areas.
The UDIO AI Music Generator
Get A.I. to write the perfect love song—or diss track
Faced last month with the annual crisis over how to mark Valentine’s Day, your columnist asked the year-old New York–based A.I.-music-creation tool Udio to compose a song for his partner.
Ever the romantic, I wrote a very silly lyric that took almost two minutes, then used the free trial of Udio to compose two versions of the song. Inside 30 seconds, Udio had conjured up an original, unique folk version and a pop treatment.
While I would pay good money to keep these from falling into the hands of anyone other than my partner, they were absolutely remarkable—real songs so far as I could tell. I then used the (also free) QR-code.io to print out a link to the ditties and stuck it, without explanation, into a nondescript Valentine’s Day card.
The disappointment on Sarah Jane’s face when she opened the card was as planned, as was the delight once she had scanned the code. A rare February 14 success.
Whether A.I. will be the bell that tolls for anyone in a creative line of work or actually help creative people is moot, but I had an interesting Zoom with one of Udio’s founders, Andrew Sanchez, a Harvard graduate and Oxford Ph.D. whose own musical taste is not so much twee homemade romantic odes as Renaissance choral polyphony.
Sanchez surprised me when he explained that both the instruments and the voices in Udio compositions are entirely artificial. There is no sampling or imitation of existing material. He then amazed me further by saying that—at least for now—the songs that a Udio user has composed for them become the user’s intellectual property.
So even if my Valentine’s songs had become multi-million-download global hits, they would be mine to profit from.
In fact, he said, this has almost happened already. Soon after Udio went online last April, a soul song about the Kendrick-Lamar-versus-Drake spat spun up on the platform by a New York comedian named Will Hatcher (under his alias “King Willonius”) was sampled by the hip-hop producer Metro Boomin. “BBL Drizzy,” the name of both Hatcher’s original and Metro Boomin’s creation, thus became the first partly A.I.-generated song to become a hit.
Interestingly, Hatcher has since said he believes A.I. tools like Udio could help Black creators and other groups who don’t have the resources to match their musical ambitions.
For full context, Udio and its main rival in the A.I.-song-generator business, Suno, are currently being sued by big players in the music business for alleged copyright infringement. The companies argue that their models learn musical principles in an abstract sense but then, using their own proprietary methods, genuinely create unique new works.
The Jimmy WB73 Mattress Vacuum Cleaner
Who knows when the hotel last cleaned that bed …
If I ever become a billionaire, the one eccentricity I will allow myself is to go full Howard Hughes and insist that every hotel room I stay in has a new, never-used bed, sheets, carpets, upholstery, and bathroom fittings.
I do seriously find it strange that even the rich and famous staying in expensive hotels are happy to walk barefoot on carpets that, for all they know, might be crunching with other people’s toenail clippings, and sleep in beds and under sheets where heaven knows what has gone on.
All of which is a way to signal that I have been trying out a mattress vacuum cleaner.
The Chinese-made Jimmy range seems to be the best around, and the stuff their WB73 model sucked out of a mattress just three years old was horrifying. The dust container was filled with a light gray powder that may or may not have been crawling with dust mites—I didn’t care to get the microscope out.
The Jimmy doesn’t merely vacuum—it also subjects the mattress and its possible living inhabitants to ultraviolet light and ultrasonic sound. Whether these extras are nonsense or actually get a mattress cleaner is anyone’s guess. Bear in mind that in China, where the bewilderingly wide Jimmy range comes from, cleanliness is, at least by Western standards, of a fanatic order.
It’s regarded as bizarre, for example, that we wear brand-new clothes without first washing them. (“How do you know that dirty country people haven’t made it?” asked my baffled Chinese friend as I once put on a new sweater straight from the packaging.)
Do high-end hotels use a mattress vacuum between guests? Who knows? It might be a good sales gimmick if a hotel chain started the practice, though.
The Sangean ATS-909X2 Multi-Band Radio
The best way to listen to everything from your local classical station to North Korean propaganda
Back in October, I wrote about a fine, retro, all-band radio I had been amusing myself with, listening to aircraft, pilots, radio hams, and even the few remaining shortwave-broadcast propaganda stations, such as North Korea’s Voice of Korea.
Well, I have now found an even better radio, the more expensive ATS-909X2, from Taiwan’s high-quality Sangean brand. It’s even more powerful, less complicated, and sounds better than my October recommendation.
I might not have mentioned the Sangean here but for a fascinating fact that has not been reported in any media I can find. It is that the probable next chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, is a keen radio ham, call sign DK7DQ, whom you could theoretically hear chatting away with fellow hams using this fine receiver.
Merz got his ham license when he was 16, and, although he hasn’t been active on the air for a while, he retains a keen interest in this marvelously nerdy hobby.
The truly strange thing is that leading politicians who are radio hams are not a rarity. Their ranks, past and present, include Barry Goldwater, the somewhat insane Republican who ran for president against Lyndon Johnson in 1964; Rajiv Gandhi, the late prime minister of India; his widow, Sonia Gandhi; the former Argentinean president Carlos Menem; the third U.N. secretary-general, U Thant; and Hugo Banzer Suárez, a Bolivian dictator.
It is impossible to explain this phenomenon. Having researched the whole thing may be a strange dream.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
