The light that comes down
Rjukan is a town of three thousand in a Norwegian valley built around a waterfall. The valley is so deep the sun does not reach the square from late September to mid-March. The mountain Gaustatoppen, 1,880 meters, takes the sun and keeps it. In 1913 its founder, Sam Eyde, proposed mirrors on the mountain to reflect sunlight down to the square. One of his few ideas never built. In 1928 they built the next best thing: Krossobanen, a cable car up the mountain. Exactly a hundred years later, in October 2013, they turned them on. Solspeilet, the sun mirror: three computer-controlled mirrors, 17 square meters each, re-aiming every ten seconds to hold the beam on the square. It lands as a patch about 600 square meters at near-full sun strength. The mirrors run on their own solar panels, which is the whole story in one sentence. A town that could not move the sun built a way to bring it down. Eyde's statue stands where the beam lands. It took a hundred years and one resident, Martin Andersen, who refused to leave it that way. The light that waited belonged to the universe. This one belongs to a town. It came down because someone decided the sun is for everyone, even the valley floor.