Who Keeps the City Lit? A New Storytelling Journey with Schneider Electric

Look out of your window tonight. Street lamps, traffic lights, a glowing screen across the road. A city at night feels like it simply shines on its own. But behind every single light there is a journey: through cables under the pavement, through humming boxes on street corners, past people who watch over the whole network every minute of every day.

Most of us never think about it, until the lights go out. That moment, when a familiar street suddenly turns dark and quiet, is exactly where our newest story begins.

We are delighted to announce The Curious Crew Explores the Chain of Light, a new story created together with Schneider Electric and written by Nina Janjetović Kajkut, founder of The Curious Crew. It invites children to be fascinated by something they use every single day but never see.

A street goes dark

Sofia, her brother Viktor and their dog Mr. Tie are walking home through a city that never seems to sleep. Then, with a snap, their street goes black, while the next street over keeps glowing as if nothing happened. The light hasn’t vanished. It has simply stopped coming their way. But why?

Mr. Tie’s tie begins to glow, and the three of them shrink smaller than a spark, down into the hidden world beneath the city. There they discover something no one ever sees: long chains of tiny golden messengers holding hands, waiting for the light to come.

From there, the children follow electricity on its whole journey. They meet a calm keeper who watches every light in the city on a giant glowing map. They step into the factory where the boxes on our street corners are built and carefully checked, one by one. They travel back in time to the very first person who imagined the chains before anyone could see them. And they discover that today, light doesn’t only flow towards our homes. Sometimes, it flows away from them.

The squeeze: how electricity really travels

Here is one of our favourite facts about electricity, and the idea at the heart of the story: when you flick a switch, nothing races down the wire from the power station to your lamp.

A wire is already full of tiny particles called electrons. When power is switched on, each one gives the next a little push, and that push travels along the whole line almost instantly, even though each electron barely moves. In our story, that becomes a warm golden squeeze passed from hand to hand along a line of messengers. Nobody takes a single step, and yet, one by one, all the way along, they light up.

It is a picture that a five-year-old can hold in their head, and one that is surprisingly close to how physicists describe it. That is what we love most about science storytelling: the right image makes something invisible suddenly feel obvious.

“The squeeze never stops. Somebody just has to steer it.”

The little green box on the corner

Have you ever noticed the humming metal boxes on street corners, beside bakeries, schools and bus stops? Most children (and most grown-ups!) walk past them every day without a second glance. In the story, Viktor tells Mr. Tie there is nothing to see there. He couldn’t be more wrong.

Those boxes are where the chains of the city meet. They connect cables, switch power from one path to another and help bring electricity safely to our homes. Because many city networks are built as loops, a street can often be reached from two directions. So when one chain breaks, the light doesn’t have to wait for a repair. It can be sent round the other way.

This is the quiet magic at the heart of this story: electricity never really stops. It just has to be shown the way round.

The people behind the light

A power grid is not only cables and machines. It is people. One of the things we wanted children to take away from this journey is that someone, somewhere, is looking after the light while they sleep.

• The keepers of the map. In control rooms, people watch the whole network around the clock, see the very moment a line goes dark, and decide how to steer power around the problem.
• The makers. In bright factory halls, people and machines work side by side to build the equipment that keeps electricity flowing, and every piece is checked before it leaves.
• The explainers. People who help others understand how the grid works, by letting them break it and fix it themselves on a tiny model city.
• The dreamers. Long before there were chains under every street, someone had to imagine them first.

By the end of the story, Sofia looks at her own parents a little differently, and at the green box by the bakery too.

When light flows both ways

For more than a century, electricity travelled in one direction: from big power stations out to our homes. That is changing fast. Rooftop solar panels turn houses into tiny power stations. Electric cars charge at posts along the kerb. Energy now travels in many directions at once, and the grid has to be cleverer than ever to keep it all in balance.

In the story, the children notice a chain where the squeeze is running “the wrong way”, away from a house instead of towards it. Following it, they find a home that has more light than it needs and simply gives the rest away to the street, the shops and the cars. It is a gentle, hopeful picture of the energy future today’s children will grow up in.

Did you know?

• Electrons are slow, electricity is fast. Inside a wire, each electron drifts forward only a fraction of a millimetre per second. Yet the push travels along the line almost as fast as light. That is the “squeeze” the messengers pass from hand to hand.
• Many city networks are built as loops. Because cables are connected in rings, a street can often be fed from two directions. If one side breaks, power can be switched round the other way.
• Some grids can heal themselves. Modern control systems can find a fault, cut off the damaged section and reroute power to everyone else, often in seconds, before most people even notice.
• Electricity now flows both ways. A house with solar panels can be a power station on a sunny afternoon, sending its spare energy back into the street.

Why we told this story with Schneider Electric

At The Curious Crew, every story is built on one rule: the story must be rooted in what our partner genuinely knows and does. Schneider Electric works on exactly the part of electricity this story is about: how energy is managed, distributed and kept flowing safely through cities, buildings and homes. That made them the ideal partner to help us take children inside a world that is all around them, yet completely invisible.

Together, we set out to answer three questions every curious child deserves an answer to: Who lights a whole city? What travels along a wire if nobody moves? And why is there a little green box on almost every corner?

Our way of telling science stories

Like every Curious Crew adventure, from The Battery Town onwards, this story goes inside-out: instead of explaining a topic from the outside, our characters shrink down and discover it from within. Children don’t memorise facts; they follow Sofia and Viktor, ask the same questions, and find the answers for themselves.

We also care about what children carry home. That is why the story ends with a short note for curious ones about staying safe: real cables and boxes are not for touching or opening, and if you ever see a broken wire, you tell a grown-up straight away. Fascination and respect for electricity belong together.

Follow the story

Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn for a first look at the illustrations and behind-the-scenes stories from the making of the story.

And tonight, when the street lamps come on one by one, take a moment to look at that little green box on the corner. Somebody, somewhere, is helping the light get round.

Does your company have an invisible story to tell to young learners? Get in touch at team@curious-crew.com or read more about how we partner with companies.

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