[MUSIC PLAYING]
I recently met a young Navy lieutenant
named Brad Snyder who'd been blinded by an IED explosion
in Afghanistan.
He said this.
He said, "I am not going to let my blindness build a brick
wall around me.
I'd give my eyes 100 times again to have the chance
to do what I've done and what I can still do."
One of the first nights that I woke up alone,
I didn't have a nurse there watching me.
I wake up.
It's a difficult realization, that first moment when
you realize, I'm blind and I can't see.
And I may never be able to see.
I look around every day and think of how many things
I see that are so beautiful.
I was in the other room, and I heard him swear,
and I came back and I said, what's wrong?
And he goes, ugh.
He goes, I can't believe this.
It's so horrible to be lost in your own house.
When the doctors came in and told him
that he was never going to be able to see again,
after they had spent many hours in surgery trying to repair
his eyes, he had a solemn sigh that lasted for about a minute,
and then he said, alright.
What can I do now?
Early high school, he said, I want
to go to the Naval Academy.
He wasn't going to stop until he made that happen.
When he got into the Naval Academy he said,
I want to go EOD.
He wasn't going to stop until he made that happen.
And then he got hurt.
He got in the hospital bed.
We started talking about options,
about what he could do with his future.
And he said, I want to go to the Paralympics.
I was smaller than everyone else.
I didn't have the advantage of height
or an enormous amount of talent.
And through the mentorship of my father,
we decided that the way that I would succeed in swimming
was just by working harder than everyone else.
Bradley Snyder of the USA with 57.18 the fastest qualifier
goes in full.
He wasn't doing it for himself.
He was doing it to prove to his family and his friends
that he was going to be OK.
Snyder there saying, I can't hear you.
I was four inches away from being dead,
and I really wanted that story to come true.
A year later, I won a gold medal.
Take your mark.
Snyder away. Very, very quick.
That will erase the badness of that day.
From now on, we can look at that day
as a great day in all of our lives.
Anything he wanted to get done, he was going to get done.
They're all in a line.
Lane number five, Bozun Yang from China.
But now the challenge from Bradley Snyder in force.
Snyder's coming through for the USA.
Bradley Snyder into the lead.
In the final stroke.
57.43.
Snyder, he takes it.
4 32 41.
Faster than this morning.
That's a gold medal for him.
Brad took the medal and put it around my neck and said, Dad,
this was a medal that we had won together
for our fight for the last year.
So, that was a pretty...it says a lot about what
that moment was to all of us.
Distinctly, we were having dinner one night
a few days after he'd return from the Paralympics,
and looked up at me, looked through me and said,
I won a gold medal.
You know?
And it was it was an interesting moment, because you could just
see it settle into his face and his body, the fact
that he knew that he had risen above the cards
that he was dealt.
Brad Snyder is inspiration not just to the blind community
but to everyone.
And that is why we named our watch the Bradley.
All the mainstream watches and clocks out there
require vision.
And checking time is still a big challenge for many people
who are visually impaired, because they just
can't see them.
Instead of designing another watch that
requires either vision or sound, we
wanted to develop a timepiece where you can touch time.
This is a timepiece, not a watch,
because you don't have to watch this to know the time.
I was fiercely independent for a long time.
I don't like asking for help, and so every time
that I have the opportunity to find
a new method or a new technique or a new technology that
enables me to do something autonomously,
it's very exciting to me, and I gain
that autonomy back a little bit.
We quickly realized that people who are sighted
are also very highly interested in a timepiece that allow them
the freedom to check time without having to look at it.
Who has not found themselves in a scenario where
during the classroom, the meetings, interviews,
or even dinner with in-laws, they just
can't look at their watches or flash their smartphone
to check time.
It's rude and embarrassing.
The way it works is by touching the titanium surface,
you will feel the location of two metal spheres--
one indicating minute, one indicating hour.
And those two spheres are connected to magnets
underneath.
So when you touch them, if you touch them too hard,
it might move a little bit, but it will always
spring back to where it should be.
It might loose the magnet connection like this.
All you need is a gentle shake,
and it will always return to the correct time.
We've worked really hard to complete the prototype.
We have the manufacturer, and it is ready to go.
So jump on board, and be part of this revolution.