Writing Challenge

Edison’s Happy New Year

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Sixteen months of embarrassingly public false starts and failed attempts led to the rarest of things from Thomas Edison: silence. He was going to allow his results to speak for themselves for once. When he and his invention were ready, one hundred thirty-five years ago tonight, on December 31, 1879, Thomas Edison invited the public to his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to witness electric lights being turned on and off for the first time.

In September 1878, Edison had convinced himself that he was so close to an electric light that he announced it to the press. “I have it now! When the brilliancy and cheapness of the lights are made known to the public, illumination by carburated hydrogen gas will be discarded,” he told the New York Sun. Gas lamps inside and outside the house, with their many inherent dangers, were about to be a thing of the past.

Like many great inventors before and after him, Edison was almost as a good a salesman as inventor. He certainly was an inventor, one of the most accomplished in American history, but he was also a self-inventor. To this day, the image we associate with Edison and the image we associate with the word “inventor” are very close: that of an obsessed tinkerer in his garage, testing and refining different materials and different systems until success reveals itself. Think of the quotes from Edison one still encounters when looking for sayings about success: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Or, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Or, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Or, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

When he spoke to the Sun, he was already famous and becoming wealthy for inventing the phonograph and powerfully refining the telegraph, so dozens of investors in his electric light project came forward with enough capital to create the new Edison Electric Light Company, which is now General Electric. They knew what it would mean to be on board financially with the man who would bring electric light to every street and each house on those streets. A new world was about to be created. But not in 1878.

The investments helped. Edison was able to hire technicians and expand his lab at Menlo Park. It might have taken longer than four months for him to realize that a light bulb, a vacuum-sealed glass enclosure, was key. In March 1879, Edison once again announced that he was even closer to success. The historian Mark Essig quotes a skeptical newspaper article, from an impatient New York Daily Graphic writer:

Day after day, week after week, and month after month passes and Mr. Edison does not illumine Menlo Park with his electric light. The belief has become rather general in this country and in England that for once the great inventor has miscalculated his inventive resources and utterly failed.

(And we think the 24/7 news media we live in now is impatient. It always has been.)

When all the experiments and tinkering resulted in a successful product, Edison and his assistants knew it. They had a light bulb that was emitting more energy than was being put into it. For once he remained quiet. He wrote one friend, “It is an immense success. Say nothing.”

He put out the word that he was ready by inviting the public to his famous lab in northern New Jersey. The demand for rail tickets became so great that the rail companies added cars to the routes west. The crowd was estimated to be over three thousand, and no one in attendance was disappointed. Not even the newspaper reporters. Edison did not provide entertainment or work the crowd up with delays and announcements or speeches about the grand era to come; instead, he turned the light on and off, again and again, and allowed the public to do the same. The grand new era was here, and by September 1882, Edison’s company was providing electricity and light to customers in lower Manhattan.

(Mark Essig’s 2003 book, “Edison and the Electric Chair,” does a great job explaining the science behind the false starts; it is also a great work of history about the legal battle between Edison and Westinghouse and AC versus DC power distribution. It and some online articles helped when I noticed that today is the 135th anniversary of the debut of something I will be turning off about two minutes after midnight tonight. Happy New Year, everyone, and may the only tears any of us shed in 2015 be tears of joy.)

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 31 asks, “We cry for lots of reasons: sadness, pain, fear … and happiness. When was the last time you shed tears of joy?”

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2014: Mine, Yours, Ours

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I am not the only person to have expressed a desire to see a “Best of 2014’s ‘Best of 2014 Lists'” list, but here are some of the bests of 2014 for The Gad About Town.

First a thank you to everyone who reads this website, even if this post is the first one by me that you have seen: Thank you.

This is a small publication with about 300 subscribers (“followers” in WordPress lingo) and a total of under 10000 views since January 2014. Of those 9000 views, it has received 645 comments and about 2000 “likes” (individuals’ faces and logos appear next to each like, making this feel like a community of sorts) across its 190 posts. Six hundred and forty-five comments out of 9207 visits is a 0.07 rate; I do not know if this is good, bad, an uncommonly high percentage, or so very extremely average and just like everyone else’s website as to be unworthy of even bothering to calculate.

I like to think of myself as a professional writer; a year ago, I built a platform out of nothing for myself, climbed on it, and started typing. Being disabled and with a tiny income means that I no longer need to: voluntarily send my résumé to some publication that I either admire or have never heard of in order to pursue a job that I almost certainly do not understand; hope to be invited to be interviewed; dress up or dress down for an interview in which “first impressions are everything” but when I am looking for a job, I do not make a good first impression; positively envision myself working with this staff for years to come (a silent thought, “I’m going to marry [looks around the office] … her”) but keep my expectations in check and understand that I will probably never lay eyes on any of these people again. Those interviews, many of them, are burned in my memory. They became good anecdotes, some of them; I interviewed for a copy editor job at a porn magazine on Lexington Avenue once.

Of the 645 comments given to this site, most have come from about a half-dozen individuals, none of whom I have (yet) met or even spoken with on the phone. Some readers have engaged me on each and every post for a week or so and then vanished. Some I think of as friends who made 2014 remarkable for me. I’m lucky to have met: Willow, who runs an “award-free” site, which is good, because this is not one of those. It’s a thank you note; Judy, a great writer and versifier who is leading a remarkable life, and I am grateful to be along for the part of the ride she shares; Mary, a fellow “spoonie” who has helped me open up in writing about my own condition; Leigh, who sometimes writes as many words in a response to one of my columns as some of the columns; Rebecca; Martha; Mrs. Anglo-Swiss; Catherine Lyons. I think I owe each of these readers a few comments in return. Please visit their sites.

The most frequently viewed post on this site in 2014 is “‘So It Goes,'” a brief reflection on Kurt Vonnegut and time’s passage. I have published some thoughts on the poet W.H. Auden five times: W.H. Auden.”

A Christmas Tree Story” received more “likes” than any other piece. “A Conspiracy Theory of Conspiracy Theories” received national attention because I am a jerk and posted a link to it in the comments section of an article on the same idea on Slate magazine, which led to me being called names. “Matt Coleman, Some Memories” and “Requiem for a Sponsor” were difficult to write. Readers wrote kind things about all of these columns. (I continue to insist on calling these posts, “columns,” because I used to work for a newspaper and I resist change.)

I am fond of three columns about equality and inequality: “Guilty of White,” the publication of which led to the end of a personal friendship when one friend revealed that they think that any person wearing a badge (especially if that badge-wearer is white) is always right, no matter what; “Inequality for No One“; and “Ice Water in My Veins,” about being disabled.

The company that hosts this and many other websites took the time to send each one of us and end-of-the-year round-up, which inspired this end-of-the-year round-up. The introduction to the letter reads:

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,176 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.

Thank you all for a remarkable 2014, Mark Aldrich.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 29 asks, “When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?”

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Inglorious Grown-up-ness

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

This morning, I became a grown-up: I attempted to remove glasses from my face that were already in my fist.

For those of you who are lifelong glasses-wearers (it is almost 40 years for me), you know that there are several distinct methods of removing eyeglasses and several messages that are communicated in the manner of their removal. Off the top of my head, there’s Two-handed and Thoughtful, One-handed and from the Right and Angry (I usually drop or accidentally fling my glasses across the room with that one), and One-handed and from the Left and Trying to Get to the Heart of Things. There are others. Putting them on in front of people communicates pretty much one thing and one thing only: Enough Fun, Everyone. Back to Work.

I do not remember right now which message I was going for this morning, but both hands were heading for my face, so it must have been Two-handed and Thoughtful or maybe simply Pensive, but like an indecisive ASL translator, I saw the glasses in my left hand as they came towards my face, so I doubled-down and confused everyone including me by improvising this: I scratched my face with the folded-up glasses, moved them from my left hand to my right, opened them, put them on, and then removed them with my left hand—One-handed and Getting to the Heart of Things. All in about five spastic seconds.

It was like semaphore, but with glasses.

It was also such a complete set of mixed messages that I should not have been surprised if someone threw a grenade at me. In some cultures, I probably requested that. It would have almost completely relieved my red-faced embarrassment.

And it was all because I was surprised. I do not do slightly forgetful things. Strike that. I believe, deep down where I know me better than anyone, that I do not do slightly forgetful things at all ever. Misplacing my glasses is something that rests just this side of awful. I had laser surgery earlier this year, which transformed me from a wearer of Bible-thick lenses from my teen years until I had the surgery to a far-sighted person who can now wear cheap, dollar store reading glasses for reading. Thus I have actually left the house without my glasses. Why? I do not do slightly forgetful things. Not me. Not someone so organized I would arrange my pens alphabetically if I could decide on an issue that this would address or simply figure out how to do it.

And simple, insistent, rigid organization has always prevented me from forgetting things: Keys in the same place every night. Wallet, too. Glasses on my bookshelf. Check, check, and check. And I have left the house minus each one of these in turn recently. I need to re-organize the role of organization in my life.

So there it was this morning: Grown-upitude in all its vanity-defeating ingloriousness. In its lapses and gaps. “Mind the Gap” isn’t just a sign for British rail passengers; it should be stamped on my forehead.

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In “Losing the Marbles,” James Merrill calls memory lapses “dreamy blinkings-out.” It is a passage of life in which, ideally, one learns to forget. It is a frustrating one more thing to be balanced against the pleasures of life in the moment, the eternal moment, the always now. Thus, memory lapses are a sort of grace in that they place the forgetter firmly in the present.

Losing The Marbles
for John Malcolm Brinnin
I
Morning spent looking for my calendar—
Ten whole months mislaid, name and address,
A groaning board swept clean …
And what were we talking about at lunch? Another
Marble gone. Those later years, Charmides,
Will see the mind eroded featureless.

Ah. We’d been imagining our “heaven”s.
Mine was to be an acrobat in Athens
Back when the Parthenon—
Its looted nymphs and warriors pristine
By the early light or noon light—dwelt
Upon the city like a philosopher,
Who now—well, you have seen.

Here in the gathering dusk one could no doubt
“Rage against the dying of the light.”
But really—rage? (So like the Athens press,
Breathing fire to get the marbles back.)
Those dreamy blinkings-out
Strike me as grace, if I may say so,
Capital punishment,
Yes, but of utmost clemency at work,
Whereby the human stuff, ready or not,
Tumbles, one last drum-roll, into thyme,
Out of time, with just the fossil quirk
At heart to prove—hold on, don’t tell me … What?
—from The Inner Room (1988)

Merrill develops a connection between the commonplace expression “losing one’s marbles” and needing to find an acceptance of this reality of life and the centuries of rage at the theft from the Parthenon of most of its sculptures, its “marbles.” One can rage or one can find grace and acceptance and … I lost the thought. Sorry.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 29 asks, “When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?”

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