| By :
Roger Brown
As the manufacturers of watches with altimeters become extremely competitive, there are more and more functions added to the watches to make them stand out from the other timepieces for sale in the field. Solar battery charging is really coming into its own. As watches become more and more miniaturized and their components more and more powerful, solar battery charging is pretty much eliminating the need for standard battery technology in watches intended for outdoorsmen. The danger is of course when you're on a hike that you run out of power for your watch. You don't get a whole lot of notice when you are about to have a battery failure. Your watch just quits working. That can be a real safety issue. If you're out on the woods and don't have a backup plan, you to be at the mercy of the elements. The great thing about solar charging is that it is perpetual. Otherwise, you have to remember to carry along a spare watch battery on a hike or mountain track. The solar battery just continually charges anytime you're out in the sun. For example, with the Casio Pathfinder watch the battery lasts approximately 6 months. But, every time you expose the watch to ambient sunlight is recharged by 100%. So, that means it's a lot safer and you stand a lot lower chance of coming up dry when you need the watch to be fully charged. Since the sun has been shining on the Earth for literally millions of years, it is unlikely this can stop anytime soon. If it does, we've got bigger problems than watch batteries. As an aside, solar chargers have been around since the mid-1950s. They were developed by Bell laboratories. These are the key elements of how a solar charger works: First, you need a silicon wafer, or solar cell is made out of silicon. When the sun shines on that silicon, the photons in the sunlight act to break electrons free from the atoms in the silicon.Those electrons migrate toward one side of the silicon wafer. That is how the green energy is created and transferred to the battery. Solar battery chargers for watches with altimeters hold tremendous promise for the watch industry. The power that it takes to electrify all these functions is getting greater and greater. And battery technology is limited by physics to the extent that we can make battery small enough and durable enough to power a watch with all this internal equipment.
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