It used to be that when you wanted things to work you’d just crank them up. If you wanted to listen to music, you cranked up a gramophone. To make movies, you cranked up a film camera that, in the birth of cinema, also doubled as projector. You wound up your clock or wristwatch. Even cars had a hand crank for a starter. No electricity or batteries needed. All it took was a little muscle power.
When I was a kid, toys had winding keys that looked rather bulky. When you twisted the key, the coil spring inside tightened and loosened when you release it, causing sudden and brief motion.
This way, you wound a toy race car to make it run. A wind up music box, on the other hand, plays Beethoven and even makes a ballerina dance to the tune.
Older friends once taught us how to make small wooden speedboats with tiny propellers behind them attached to a rubber band under the hull. You simply wound the propeller to twist the rubber band and released it in the water. For a few seconds the toy boat sped up like a torpedo in the water. We had fun racing our little boats at the river bank near our place.
Perhaps it is for these memories that I continue to have a fascination for hand-cranked gadgets. And it seems that hand-crank and wind-up technology is making a comeback, thanks to the recent movement for off-the-grid living. It’s the other side of the digital revolution.
Disasters caused by extreme weather have made us all realize the importance of being able to tap alternative sources of power when the local power grid breaks down, damage that could last a week or more. Survival even in urban settings calls for gadgets that don’t require to be plugged in or even have batteries that wear out easily and poison the environment.
This new consciousness is resulting into the rise of solar powered gadgets but also so-called “human-powered” ones or those that run on energy produced by human kinetics. They used to be expensive. The first time I saw a hand-cranked flashlight, an imitation of the original design used by American soldiers in World War II, I could not afford it. At a hardware in a mall, I also saw a hand-cranked radio that came with a flashlight and a red strobe light for signalling during emergencies. It was also too expensive at that time.
Today, the proliferation of Chinese versions made solar and hand-cranked gadgets like this much cheaper. I have started to collect a few solar and hand-cranked lamps (sometimes they come with both options) for use at home during brownouts. Some of these are so bright they actually provide enough to power the house at night, so we don’t have to panic now when a disconnection notice from the electric company comes too late.
I keep a flashlight with a red signaling strobe light that runs on both solar and hand-crank power in the car’s glove compartment. Another hand-cranked flashlight that doubles as an emergency hammer designed for breaking the windshield is kept in the door compartment.
My smallest hand-cranked gadget is a square inch size LED flashlight I attached to a key ring. I’m eyeing a hand-cranked flashlight that has both AM and FM radio with a built in speaker and a small hand-cranked powerbank that could recharge a dead cellphone or tablet next time I visit my favorite electronics store.
Right now, I still grind my own roasted coffee beans. Perhaps soon, we can have a hand-cranked pocket espresso maker to go with it. Even the steam that comes out of the espresso maker could probably be used to power a small “steampunk” fan or MP3 player.
And with a hand-cranked laptop, I won’t have to go to any cafe to plug in so I can write this column and send it to my editor online. I can even receive a call of confirmation from the newsroom through a wind-up mobile landline phone.
Welcome to the new old world.
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