The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [48]
Although I had been alive for a troublingly long time, I had neglected ever to step under an electricity line, so I was surprised to hear the intense noise it released, as though strips of tin foil were being blown furiously around a cavernous fan oven. Forty thousand kilovolts were running along the line, sparking an excited chemical reaction in the moist air as nitrogen and oxygen particles split apart. The corona discharge, as the phenomenon was called, prompted Ian to think of his recently concluded fifteen-year marriage. He explained that it was to this crackling sound, under the line running between Torness power station and the outskirts of Edinburgh, that he had first kissed the woman whom he had been abruptly left by a month previously.
Ian told me that, on an early date, he had driven Megan to some pylons to show her that the air around them can be so charged with volts that it can spontaneously ignite a small electrical device. He brought out a fluorescent strip from the back of his car and held it up above his head, the household bulb flickering into life as it drew invisibly on the airborne current, the fragile vessel of milky luminous glass lighting up the couple as they moved towards their first embrace against the inky backdrop of the Lammermuir Hills.
In the end it had been a lack of shared interests which drew them apart, Ian concluded, gravely and succinctly.
To shift the mood, he presently tilted back his head and called my attention to some small cigar-shaped cylinders fixed to the conductor wires at either end of the pylon under which we were standing. He told me that their inventor, George Stockbridge, an engineer from California, had in the 1920s observed that the length of cable which each pylon could safely carry was limited by the cable’s tendency to vibrate dangerously even in light winds. It was Stockbridge’s achievement to show that this movement could effectively be stilled if a precisely calibrated vibration was applied in the opposing direction a short distance from every mast. He had devoted a decade and, some of his colleagues later surmised, some of his sanity, to fabricating a tube consisting of two heavy weights separated by a spring, which resonated at a different frequency from the conductor and thereby ensured the stability of the pylon as a whole. There seemed to be few man-made innovations whose creation had not exacted a disproportionate degree of sacrifice and ingenuity.
As we continued, Ian informed me that our electricity line was composed of ninety-one strands of aluminium cable twisted together as in a rope, a specification which placed it at the more imposing end of the spectrum, minor loads being generally carried along by lines having as few as seven strands to them. I also learnt that because a cross section of a line reveals a configuration reminiscent of the pattern made by a cut through a floral stem, various thicknesses of cable are named after different flowers. A seven-strand aluminium cable is known as a poppy, a nineteen-strand one as a laurel, a thirty-seven-strand as a hyacinth, a sixty-one-strand as a marigold and a 127-strand as a bluebonnet. Our slow progress to London would unfold in the linear shadow of a cowslip.
4.
Following the pylons meant stepping off the usual routes in order to wander at unorthodox angles through the landscape, over fences, through woods and under railway arches. We were reminded of the range of alternative networks which lie like a faded script under the dominant thoroughfares of cars and trains: the courses inscribed by water pipes, gas mains, fibre-optic cables, aircraft, Roman roads, badgers and foxes – axes that bypass the expected centres of interest and only announce their intentions through subtle or unfathomable clues, like a run of masts, some droppings or a grey box partially overgrown with ivy at the perimeter of a field.
At this stage in its journey, the line kept well away from humans.