When Matty Sallin, 34, was working on a degree in art and technology at New York University, he got interesting homework in electronic class. He decided to invent an alarm clock.
"Everybody has to stand it every day, and it is really unpleasant!" he says. He asked different people what they would like to be woken up instead of a noisy alarm. A lot of them said, "The smell of bacon (培根肉)". So Sallin and two classmates invented a new kind of alarm clock: a wooden box with a pig face and a digital clock that uses the smell of cooking bacon instead of the sound to wake someone up. He explains, "There's no danger of burning, because I built it carefully. It uses halogen light bulbs (钨卤灯) instead of a fire for cooking and turns off automatically (自动地) after ten minutes. Yes, the clock itself can do it. Just a few easy steps are needed to set the alarm."
"What you do is to put some frozen bacon in the night before and set the alarm," says Sallin.
"If you set the alarm for 8:00, it will turn on at 7:50 and slowly cook for ten minutes under the halogen bulbs," he says. Then the bulbs turn off and a fan blows the smell out through the nose of the pig.
"So instead of an alarm, you get a bacon smell awake," says Sallin. "Then you can open the door on the side and pull the bacon out and eat it."
When Sallin was a kid, he spent a lot of time making drawings of inventions. "I wanted to make a lift in my backyard and a special tree house," he says. "But I never really thought I could be called an inventor!"
Sallin got an A in the class and went on to other things — but people continue to hear about his invention and email him every day asking where they can buy his alarm clock.
