The Sun, a Broken Watch,
and a Mystery

Once, when I was a kid, about nine years old, I took apart a watch. It was a solar-powered watch - one that my mother had gotten for me from a catalog. It had a black, plastic band, and just a few functions, but it was solar powered. The first day I had it, I stayed out all day with it until the sun went down. That night, I didn't get to bed until I'd experimented with every source of light I could find, from flashlights, to penlights, to matches (two years later I set my room on fire with another such experiment), to a jarful of lightening bugs with my watch at the bottom. I fell asleep with my watch taped to my window, so it would get as much morning sunlight as possible.

When my alarm went off, I jumped out of bed, strapped the watch to my wrist, and noticed that the little power monitor said the battery was low. I'd forgotten that my room faced southwest. To make up for losing out on the morning sun, I decided to stay out all day, letting the sun shine on my watch until it tired and sank into the western sky. Now, I'm Peruvian, so I already had a darker complexion than most of my neighbors in Ohio, but by the end of that day my mother told me I was darker than my shadow. She told me that to cheer me up. It didn't help much though, because I'd only had the watch for a day and a half before I dove to hard to catch a baseball, and it broke.

It didn't just break. It was crushed. I knew it the second it happened. Without even looking at my wrist, I could almost hear the sound of the small glass cover cracking, and the little display going black. I pressed my finger into it and watched the screen change shades, and thought the watch was filled with a special kind of black ink.

At that point, the ballgame was over, the whole day was darkened. How could I keep playing if my watch was broken? I had to figure out a way to fix it or make it useful. So I collected it pieces, held them carefully in my cupped hands, and went home. I pulled my family's tool kit out of the garage, and got to work taking the watch apart completely. What I found just baffled me. The solar panel looked so simple - a small, plastic rectangle with five tiny glass panels set in it. It just couldn't do what it was supposed to do, I thought. There was no way this little set of plastic and glass could do something as huge as keep track of time. I'd already learned that time was eternal, an endless span that stretched back before I could imagine, into a big bang, and forward into something totally unknown, the future. And yet here was this little thing that could actually "tell time," and it was powered by a fragile solar panel.

I pried the watch apart piece by piece and instead of finding out how it all worked, or figuring out how to make it work on something else (like a small light bulb - which I tried and it didn't work) I was left with another huge mystery. Since I was outside, I stopped working on the watch at one point, and just stared up at the sky. I shielded my eyes with my hands, and I tried to steal a peek at the sun. There it was, that miraculous, burning sphere, the star that all life on earth depended on. Now I knew, it wasnt just warm, wasnt just good for plants, tanning, and going to the beach. The sun could actually make things, inventions, man-made things, work.

It was a revelation, a mind-bending thing to learn. In Peru, my family relied on the river for power, and in Ohio I had only seen power plants and windmills. All these things looked so complex, and I couldn't imagine trying to fit a small hydraulic power plant or windmill on my wrist. Batteries made sense, I'd used them on lots of gadgets and toys. But here was the sun - enormous, plentiful, and yet manageable enough to fit into a child's solar powered wristwatch. Even now, just remembering that day, it seems impossible to fathom.

Today, I have a child of my own, and solar power isn't quite the mystery it used to be. Articles, books, magazines, and Web sites abound that tell you about everything from the government's use of photovoltaics (that's the techie term for the science of solar power) to how to make the most of solar power at home, courtesy of Home Power Magazine. What amazes me now, isn't our ability to harness the power of the sun for everything from water heaters to power saws, but why more people don't take advantage of it.

A couple years ago, while reading up on the history of the old West, I came upon some surprising photographs. They were of early frontier families, standing with pride in front of their solar water heaters. Some of these pictures dated back to the late 1800s. Imagine that, solar heated water over a century ago. Even today, I know some people with barebones cabins in New Hampshire that still take cold showers. Maybe I should call them and let them know that the solar power technology has been around since 1839. That's more than 150 years ago. A lot has changed since then. Cars on the roads, small towns have expanded into big cities, and people have grown more and more dependent on large quantities of energy. A century ago, who would have thought that a city the size of present-day Chicago could be thinking of relying more on solar and wind energy? It's happening, though. Slowly, cities and states are following the leads of those early settlers out West, and are beginning to lean toward more renewable sources of power. And why not, solar power, especially in combination with other forms of power, like wind power or even power from the local utilities company, can save consumers a lot of money.

This summer, while it's sunny and warm, would you rather be using electricity or batteries to listen to the radio, or would you prefer to have your radio powered by the sun? What about your television or your computer? The list of things that could run on solar power is almost endless. C. Crane Company has several solar powered products:

We have a lot of solar powered products at C.Crane, too many to list here without making you dizzy. If you'd like to see more of them, you can either browse through the on-line catalog, request a print catalog, or type "solar" in the search box.

I can't imagine what I would have done with some of these gadgets if I'd gotten them when I was a kid. Perhaps I would have used a radio solar cell to power my toy racecars. . . don't know if it would have worked, but I probably would have tried. My four-year-old son loves to crank our CC Observer, and he thinks it's "cool" that it works outside all by itself. He says "the sun cranks it up for us."

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If you are interested in using C. Crane's articles on your own Web site, please let me know. I'd be happy to take a look at your Web site and see what we can do. Good-bye for now, Carlos. About the author