Tom Sponheim

Tom Sponheim, who lives in Seattle, Washington, spent a decade as a web developer at Microsoft where he was awarded numerous patents, including one of the earliest patents for the revolutionary AJAX programming method.

Tom has been involved in the international solar cooking movement since 1989 and is the creator of the Solar Cooking Wiki (solarcooking.org), the world's most comprehensive source of solar cooking information. He is also the co-inventor of the Collapsible Solar Box Cooker (solarcooking.org/col) and the Easy Lid Cooker (solarcooking.org/easy).

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic Tom realized that the COVID-19 lockdown would especially affect the poor, who would have nothing saved for such emergencies. He then initiated the 100 Families Project (100-families.org), which provided money for groceries to one hundred families living in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, and helped these families reduce the money they spent on cooking fuel through the use of thermoses, bean sprouting, and solar cookers. Ten months into the project, more than half of the families had been assisted in starting their own small businesses.

On another note, in 2001, Tom bought a number of envelopes filled with film negatives at a flea market in Barcelona, Spain. After he realized that the resulting photographs must have been the work of a master photographer, he made extensive use of social media to discover the identity of the unknown photographer (tinyurl.com/sponbarc). Since that time, these photographs by the late female photographer, Milagros Caturla, have been exhibited and included in a number of books celebrating historical photography of Barcelona.

Tom can be contacted by emailing info@flexthinking.org or by visiting the Flex Thinking Facebook group (www.facebook.com/groups/flexthinking).