I walked down the path through the park during my walkabout in this morning in New Jersey. I was thinking again about the solar machine I am building and two prototype versions which I want to begin installing at the farm this summer. The notion of farm machinery with cast iron parts and a 100 year lifespan and my grandfather sitting on the stump next to the 6 Volt battery powered electric fence unit he had installed at the farm all crossed my mind. I think it was the self sustained remoteness of it that led him to sit on a wood stump next to it as it thunked next to him, clicking like a clock and with each pulse kicking the pendulum away for anther swing and sending a high voltage pulse through the thousands of feet of a bare single wire strung on fenceposts and insulators to the far meadows and trees, keeping the cattle safely in the night pasture and saving hundreds of hours of fencing labor keeping the pasture fenced in the old fashioned way. He must have sat there sometimes unbeknownst to everyone in the moonlight, thinking of his grown children, his grandchildren, his long departed wife Rosa, the past, life itself, and that remote, independent beating machine next to him, out in the field powered by a lantern battery. I thought of that and how all of that drives me to invent and design this modest, rugged machine that runs by itself on sunlight and will capture and transform over 400,000 Kilowatt hours of solar energy into hot water and electricity over the next 100 years.
At that moment the whole world suddenly brightened as the morning overcast parted for a few seconds in the wind and the light of the sun burst though. “I help you someday, Butch”, his long ago words bubbled to mind in the same moment and I knew with little doubt I had just been contacted by my grandfather. Life is never easy even when we know where we must go and what we must do, but I feel ever more confident that my grandfather would be pleased with starting the solar installation at the farm.