The very term CW&T uses to describe the Type-C Pen is indicative of how refreshingly cool the writing instrument is. Labeled as a Bookmark Pen, the Type-C is a flat, reliable writing tool with a form and deploying mechanism that are both one-of-a-kind.
Machined out of titanium, with a high-quality cartridge that promises to never dry or leak, the Type-C Pen is literally the kind that’s designed to be carried around anywhere you go. Its flat, 3.5mm design fits wonderfully inside notebooks, between pages, and even in pockets, while at the same time feeling great to hold. Type-C’s titanium construction gives it the strength it needs to remain incredibly thin, while a bent steel member sits around it, flipping forwards or backwards to cover or expose the Type-C’s 0.4mm black Hi-Tec-C Coleto ink cartridge.
The magic of the Type-C Pen is its ability to be both a serious writing instrument for everyday use, and a fun pen that you can fidget with, and grow incredibly fond of. Its lightweight and compact form factor is handy, quite literally, while its true purpose was to slide easily into books or in pockets without creating the bulge a conventional cylindrical pen would… And it won’t roll off tables either!
Time isn’t circular, but clocks are. You look at a calendar and it depicts time in a linear fashion, but the watch on your hand or the clock on your wall breaks down the concept of 24 hours into a loop in which you live your life. The Time Since Launch clock isn’t like that. It sees time for what it truly is. Something that’s always moving, never stopping, and more importantly, something that doesn’t come a full circle, but rather is on an endless, infinite journey. The Time Since Launch is a count-up clock, allowing you to measure the time since a certain event, like a birth, anniversary, launch, etc. The Time Since Launch takes an event in time and begins its journey from there, running for years, and even millennia after the event.
The Time Since Launch is a timekeeping device in the broadest sense possible. It counts hours, minutes, and seconds, but it also counts days, months, years, centuries and millennia. It’s the equivalent of adding a bookmark in time, allowing you to appreciate how far you’ve come since the moment you began the clock. Meant clearly for special events, the Time Since Launch can be launched by simply pulling out a pin from within the device to get it running. Built with two LCD screens encased in a borosilicate tube with aluminum caps at each end, the Time Since Launch breaks time down into two parts. One screen reads hours, minutes, and seconds, while the screen to its left captures as many as 999999 days, or 2739 years.
Made for occasions that hold great relevance in one’s life, like the birth of a child, a marriage, a company launch, or personal goals of great significance like the day you gave up smoking, the Time Since Launch begins its countdown, or rather a count-up the minute you pull the pin out from the clock, marking the length of your journey since that moment when your life changed completely.
It’s time to launch your personal epoch. Time Since Launch is a single-use, long-scale launch clock. Pull the pin to begin counting for 2,738 years.
Use this very long-scale timepiece to mark the beginning of your epoch. It could begin when you get married, have a baby, quit smoking, launch a rocket, or on an ordinary Tuesday morning.
Your epoch is safeguarded within this unique timepiece designed and over-engineered to outlive you. Suspended in a durable borosilicate glass tube and sealed with gasketed aluminum end-caps, two LCDs show days, hours, minutes and seconds since launch. This timepiece is built to count for 2,738 years.
58 days 14 hours 39 minutes 46 seconds
1796 days 17 hours 06 minutes 50 seconds
64 days 12 hours 10 minutes 15 seconds
10 days 17 hours 25 minutes 03 seconds
Inspiration. 1962. MA-6. John Glenn. A stopwatch. A shared global timezone.
When John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit earth, the only piece of technology on his body, other than a spacesuit, was a 12-hour stopwatch. Soon after launch, Glenn started his stopwatch in sync with tracking stations across the world. At that moment, Mission Elapsed Time (MET) began counting up from zero. A launch timer was not only required for a successful mission (ie. to calculate position), it also created a shared global timezone.
Quietly situated at the center of a tremendous collaborative feat of human innovation, the launch clock marks an arbitrary Moment Zero. A moment shared by humans scattered all over the world and one hurling through space.
Elevate an otherwise arbitrary moment to super awesome status.
What’s your Moment Zero?
You might pull the launch pin when you drop everything and join the peace corps, or when you stop drinking, or when you and your best friend move to different cities and want to maintain closeness through a shared timezone. It’s also ok to launch on a random Wednesday morning, making that moment special, simply because you want to make it yours.
Make time your own.
We keep time, consume, and organize around it. Time rules us and we don’t own it.
Time Since Launch was originally conceived at MIT Media Lab as part of Che-Wei Wang’s Master’s thesis. In this work, Wang proposes several devices to give people power over their time.
Be present.
Time Since Launch is as much (if not more) about presence, than it is a reference to the past. Beginning with a single moment, Time Since Launch is a continuous reference to our brief existence on a continuum far greater than we’re used to imagining every day.
On launch.
When you’re ready, pull the stainless-steel launch pin to initiate the timer. You can only do this once! This action begins a chain reaction burning that instant into the chip’s silicon, making it yours forever.
Time Since Launch does one very specific thing. It does that thing well. And it does that thing for a very very long time.
Technical description and design overview.
Building a 2,738 year timepiece. Time Since Launch is off the grid, both in terms of power and its ability to keep accurate time. Unlike your phone, it doesn’t rely on a surprisingly fragile external multi-billion dollar timing and power infrastructure.
Made with precision machined metals, over-engineered and over-specified electronics, Time Since Launch will outlive you. This assembly of parts – from physical materials to electronic components – were selected with longevity in mind.
Time Since Launch ships with its LCDs in pre-launch mode, this rhythmic cycling through each of the segments ensures even wear and tear.
On launch, Time Since Launch burns your moment into the chip’s silicon and begins counting. The displays indicate elapsed time in your epoch, counting up to 999,999 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds.
If anything ever happens to your Time Since Launch, as long as the chip is physically intact, you can recover your Moment Zero and transplant it into a surrogate.
Materials selected for durability and legibility. Time Since Launch is made from machined aluminum endcaps and a durable borosilicate (Pyrex) tube. The electronics are suspended and deliberately made visible. The enclosure is easy to take apart. If ever something breaks, you can easily identify what went wrong so it can be fixed.
Electronics specified for longevity and low power consumption. Time Since Launch consists of only essential electrical components to mitigate potential failure points. Mounted on a matte black PCB with gold plated traces, Time Since Launch has 2 chips, a few passive electronic components (resistors, diodes and capacitors), two 6-digit LCDs and batteries. That’s it.
It draws less than 6uA (microamps) of current running at 3.3 volts. This gives us an energy usage of about 20 microwatts (millionths of a watt).
A 20+ year battery life. Time Since Launch ships with 2 x AA Energizer L91 Ultimate Lithium batteries. These batteries have a capacity of 3,500mAh, and a 20 year shelf life, which means they are guaranteed to have 95% of their original capacity after 20 years of sitting on a shelf.
To arrive at our 20+ year battery life estimate, we take Energizer’s stated capacity of 3,500mAh and round down to 3,000mAh (to be conservative), divide by 6uA and then take off another 30% (to account for external factors). This gives us an estimated run time of 40 years.
A real time chip with ±2ppm accuracy. To keep time, Time Since Launch uses a DS3231 chip. This real-time clock chip with a temperature-compensated crystal oscillator is accurate to ±2 parts per million (ppm). This level of accuracy is 10x better than a normal wristwatch crystal which, with an accuracy of ±20ppm, can loose or gain up to 1.73 seconds per day.
If you were to shoot a basketball from a court in NYC to a hoop in Philly with ±2ppm accuracy, you’d miss by less than 10 inches.
Safely change batteries without losing time. About 6 months before it is time to change the batteries, the display indicates your batteries are low. During the swap, backup capacitors keep the real time chip powered and running without losing time.
To change the batteries, pull the aluminum caps out of the glass tube to expose the battery holders. Pull out your old batteries and put in new ones.
Specifications.
Dimensions 174mm (6.85”) x 38mm (1.5”)
Weight 285g (10oz)
Materials Anodized aluminum (6061-T6), stainless steel (303) launch pin, borosilicate glass (Pyrex) tube with a 4mm (0.1575”) thick wall, Buna-N o-rings, PCB and electronic components.
Ships w/ 2 x AA Energizer L91 Ultimate Lithium batteries.
It’s no secret that we’re in love with Titanium as a material. Virtually indestructible, lightweight, amazing to the touch, and that faint blue color… Titanium will outlast you and everybody after you. It doesn’t rust or patina, which means even after generations, it’ll look brand new. Honestly now, what’s there not to love?!
The Titanium Pen Type-B is a successor to the wildly successful Pen Type-A. The Type-A was a meticulously engineered metal pen that came with its own squarish architect’s scale cover. You slid the pen in, and you were left with a beautiful metal scale. Titanium Type-B was made as a classic alternative to Type-A. The Titanium Type-B features a sleeve made of titanium (Type-A was made of stainless steel) that rather than taking on a specifically functional requirement, aims at becoming a classic, to be used anywhere, anytime, for centuries.
Precision made out of titanium, the body and sleeve of the Titanium Type-B have a finish that I can no longer describe as sleek, because they surpass that. Smooth, machine-milled surfaces with absolutely no branding whatsoever give the Titanium Type-B an air of purity. The only visible surface change on the pen is a flat surface on the sleeve that keeps the pen from rolling off.
The tolerances on the pen’s parts are so incredibly low, that they’re something to be experienced too. When you pull the pen out of the sleeve, you hear that pleasing ‘pop!’ as the pen and sleeve separate, allowing air to rush in. When you put the pen back into the sleeve, it slides in ever so gently, almost like a pneumatic piston. Watching it do so is a thing of sheer beauty! The Titanium Type-B literally redefines precision.
The pen is a part of Kickstarter’s Gold selection, which aims at re-launching old classic crowd-favorite projects. For a limited amount of time, the Titanium Pen Type-B is up for grabs, with over 600 backers at the time of writing! The Pen Type-A is up for grabs too (given how it’s a classic), and if you’ve already got the Type-B you can opt to buy just the sleeve for the Titanium Type-B.
If you relate to the Keymaker from the Matrix, you probably have too many keys. So until biometric authentication takes over and replaces all your keys with fingerprints and retina scans, we’re just going to have to solve your too-many-keys-but-nowhere-to-put-them woes using good-old industrial design!
The Key Wrangler is an outwardly simple product, but makes use of ingenious problem-solving techniques to not just segregate your keys, but secure them too. Most keychains feature either a ring to hold your keys, or a carabiner that you slip your keys into. The Key Wrangler features both! Merged together in a sort of “keychain remix” (say the creators), the Wrangler features a carabiner/clip that hooks onto your garment, bag, or zipper along with a key post that neatly holds your keys (and even the occasional USB stick) in an organized row.
The carabiner clip is a literal life saver. While keys tend to slip out of your pockets while seated, or get pickpocketed, the carabiner clip holds them firmly in place, preventing gravity from doing its thing, and deterring thieves from easily grabbing your keys. Having used a carabiner keychain for more than 5 years now, I can attest that the carabiner clip is by far the most useful feature of a keychain. Below the clip lies a slender knurled rod that acts as a hanging-bar for your keys. The rod makes segregating keys an absolute dream, because unlike those keychains with loops, the rod holds the keys in a fixed arrangement. So even in the dark (or if you’re giving the keychain to your friend), it’s easy to remember that your first key is the house key, the second key is the cupboard key, the third key unlocks your garage. That arrangement never changes (unlike in looped keychains), making referencing incredibly easy, especially if you have more than five keys (or bad memory). If you’re anything like the Keymaster, needn’t fear since the Key Wrangler holds up to 17 keys!
Even though the Key Wrangler takes on a complicated challenge, its design language echoes “Form follows Function” through and through. The piano shaped key holder keeps a low profile, and makes use of simple production techniques, allowing it to be not just functionally efficient but energy efficient during production too. A perfect addition to your EDC (every day carry) or even your home, the Key Wrangler does the job of a silent savior, not just holding your keys, but securing them as well as keeping them organized and always accessible!
4 years in the making, Pen Type-B is built to last generations! It’s not a space pen or a tactical pen or even feature-rich. It doesn’t even have a clip or a grippy surface. It’s simply the essentials! Precision machined out of solid metal, the body of the pen is made out of stainless steel and the sleeve out of polished brass. A tiny radial pattern of holes near the pen cylinder tip allows for just the right amount of air to flow into the pen to equalize the air pressure on the ink cartridge as you pull the pen out of its sleeve. The ultra-high machining tolerances between the pen and sleeve create a piston-like effect. The pen falls slowly into its sleeve and even makes a pleasant popping sound when you pull it out quickly. Better yet, its brass is purposefully unfinished so it picks up your unique patina over time!
