Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [63]
Even Tesla was never able to adequately explain electricity:
Now, I must tell you of a strange experience which bore fruit in my later life. We had a cold [snap] drier than ever observed before. People walking in the snow left a luminous trail. [As I stroked the cat] Macak's back, [it became] a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks. My father remarked, this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see on the trees in a storm. My mother seemed alarmed. Stop playing with the cat, she said, he might start a fire. I was thinking abstractly. Is nature a cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded.... I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvelous sight on my childish imagination. Day after day I asked myself what is electricity and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.
Here was light taken on faith and perhaps replacing faith. Man of letters and historian Henry Adams understood the true significance of the dynamo: "To Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring." And why wouldn't it? One moment our world was dark, and the next brilliant. That almost no one understood how this was accomplished, and that this light, unrelated to the eons of tallow and coal; this light, requiring nothing of us—no fussing over a flame or wick, no worry over the quality of the oil; this light, with its own particular trajectory tied to the precision of the industrial age—timed and tuned, and pitched and keyed, all rhythm and exactitude; this light, conjured by wizards—as both Edison and Tesla with their varying temperaments were called; this light, with its constancy and brilliance, was nothing if not the evidence of things unseen.
What it did require, of course, was that we go forward on trust. What culminated at Niagara was only the beginning: the electric grid would come to be considered the greatest technical accomplishment of the twentieth century. New wizards would detach us even more from the things of this earth, and we would need to trust also that our data, words, and life's work would not in an instant disappear from before our eyes. H. G. Wells understood that something fundamental had shifted as he stood looking at the falls in 1906. Not only had the spiritual been fused to the industrial, but it also seemed that some glory had been taken away from Nature herself. He wrote:
The dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company, for example, impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the Winds; are indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than that accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are clean, noiseless, and starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel-pit ... has an almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines.... The dazzling clean switch board, with its little handles and levers, is the seat of empire over more power than the strength of a million disciplined, unquestioning men.
PART III
So if we moderns were to enter into an interior of the past, we would very soon feel uncomfortable. However beautiful it might be—and it was often wonderfully so—what for them exceeded sufficiency would not be enough for us.
—FERNAND BRAUDEL,
Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800
10. New Century, Last Flame
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