The Wristwatch of the Long Now

One of the many criticisms of the Apple Watch is that it is priced as an expensive to very expensive watch, but has the expected lifetime of a smartphone. Expensive watches hold their value, not for the four or five years that Apple products hold theirs, but across generations - so is this, too, to be lost? Why don't we try and do better?

I have always been fascinated by building electronics for a very long life. I collect old radios, and have one that's getting on for eighty years old: it's in a sorry state but is very capable of being revived. Earlier radios yet - the renowned cat's whisker sets - have nothing that wears out and need no power. If kept properly, they'll work as well in five hundred years as they did on the day they were made. (Transmitters are another matter, but even so...), I once built an 'eternal' Radio 4 Longwave receiver which was as simple as possible, had no moving parts except the speaker and no electrolytic capacitors (electro-chemical components that degrade over time) and was powered by a pair of solar cells. There's always the problem of night - I couldn't get around the need for rechargeable batteries, which die quite quickly, but they can last a long time if you treat them gently. it worked perfectly well for the ten years or so I had it.

But how do you build electronics for the centuries? Moreover, why would you? There are aesthetic and cultural reasons - we value antiquities for what they tell us about our ancestors, and ourselves, as well as their intrinsic beauty. They are messages from the past, time-travellers whose value constantly renews as we discover new ways to look at them. But there are practical aspects, too; what we can learn by reassessing lhe data locked inside their fabric informs our understanding today and predicting the future. There is no reason why electronics, our premier technology, shouldn't be consciously designed for that future, to carry on that work. It would be something that didn't deny consumerism but gives it more ambiguity, new ways to consider what it is, exactly, that we're doing - even who we are.

One of the most striking projects is the Clock of the Long Now, a multi-million dollar effort to build a timepiece that will not only survive ten millennia but keep good time throughout. It's mechanical, but the problems it faces - power, maintainability, reliability, clarity of operation, independence from external resources - are the same that any Methuselah electronics has to deal with. And there are no reasons to think that any of these problems would be unanswerable - when we do decide to design for the long-term, we can do quite well. The Voyager space probes are still alive after nearly forty years in space, after all, which is a lot harsher place to live than your front room. There's just no commercial imperative.

Which is where the concept of beauty comes in. We are predisposed to find well-engineered things worth having in themselves, far more so objects that also display consummate artistry.  Apple makes aesthetics one of its primary selling points, and that's worked out quite well, so it's safe to assume that there'll be a market for things that are not only beautiful and functional, but intend to hang around for hundreds of years.

What might these things be? A long-standing idea is that of the life catcher, a gizmo that records a wide variety of pictures and daily events over years, but none of the prototypes and experimental devices have been commercialised. These are probably too complex to be a good starting point for the new tradition of devices that outlive their owners I'm proposing

Any data stored over deep time is interesting. If you could look over even just your average daily ambient temperature over your lifetime, you'd find much to intrigue you. Or the loudest five minutes of audio every Christmas Day, or tiny snapshots of time spent with relatives, or how busy your WiFi is or... well, there is so much evanescent information in our lives. What would you most want to relive about your grandparents' time - or that of their grandparents?

Every aspect of design is challenging. Electronic components - simple and complex - do not have century-designed lifetimes, and some, such as flash memory, have very limited specifications. But that's because they haven't been built that way. Power sources wear out, mechanical systems wear out, solar cells degrade, and energy harvesting harvests very little. But you can design for intermittent power, and you can make things repairable and replaceable without disrupting the integrity of the data collected. And you can set your own rules: we're conditioned to think about continuous or periodic data collection, but what if there was, say, a diamond that quietly stored energy from light and only sampled and stored data when enough had been accumulated? Interesting things are only going to happen when there's light about, after all - so if you can crack a very low energy clock that maintains a timestamp, then you've got a worthwhile system.

That very wide range of challenges makes it somewhat unimportant exactly what the first finished device will do, because there's so much to sort out.  There are so many avenues to explore and we have so many marvellous new techniques in our toolbox of materials engineering. Each functional module can be developed in parallel, alongside research into form and purpose, and there will be commercial spin-offs along the way. Artists and craftspeople should find plenty of inspiration to play around with, too.

It'll be a long project and will take some dedication and support, but it's audacious enough to be worth it. The Clock Of The Long Now is funded by Jeff Bezos; Apple might like to think of the Wristwatch Of The Long Now as a very fitting complement.

Legacies can be potent.