The Watch That Saved a Life (or Three)

There are two stories about the iBeam watch with a pop up magnifying lens and built in LED flashlight that are really heart warming and make inventing things worthwhile. One story is about an elderly couple that were out walking a trail in Maine during the fall when the colors were blazing. They were heading back to their car as it started to get dark and eventually realized the trail was getting narrower and that they were lost. They didn’t know what to do as it became completely dark and they could no longer see any trail. The wife asked the husband if he was wearing the watch she had given him for his birthday and he replied “yes”. “You know there’s a flashlight in that watch”, she said as he lifted his wrist and pushed the button. “The whole area lit up and we could see where the trail was and we followed it back to a point where it had split and we had gone the wrong way, “we were heading further into the woods”, she reported.   

That night the temperature dropped below freezing and they told me had they not had the iBeam they would have been lost and succumbed to the cold. “Your watch saved our lives”, they wrote. 

The second story is about a mountain biker riding the Flume Trail in Lake Tahoe. He was at one of the furthest points when he had a flat tire. He had a repair kit and a pump but the leak was close to the valve and wouldn’t seal and kept going flat. He happened to be wearing one of the early iBeams and had enough sun to use the magnifying lens to heat up the patch and get it to seal and hold. “If that hadn’t worked I would have been walking out of their and would have froze my butt off since I was at 8,000 feet and it got really really cold when the sun went down”, he said. “It saved my life”, he told me.