"...WILSON GOT HIS WAR..."

14. " …WILSON GOT HIS WAR…"
(from 'The Edison Papers'):

"Now time goes on has gone on passes me by after the fire we rebuilt and were up again in less than a year" he said to me still walking as we looked past the low brick wall which covered what now was a bleak yet quiet parking lot across from the Black Maria site "everything stayed pretty much the same along to the end in 1931 Wilson got his war and the creepy bastards flew into it with the rage and greed of all the world and then just as I was preparing to get out they moved again towards war footing seeking rubber and glass and radios and communications and technology like all of that could win the crafty minds of bad people that's all it was at that point bad people doing bad things to make bad money and because of that my labs went on to be legendary and Bell and Westinghouse and Edison became names to reckon with and the whole nation was lighted and people saw and heard but there I was going daff in the back of Llewellyn alone and Mina and the great piano and the room for socials and the receptions and the President came and Newark and New York and Cleveland and Boston and the whole world over came to see me and in my later dotage I mumbled and grunted and pointed and the dogs ran and I strolled quietly and I tried and tried - you know they attempted to get me to work on the electric chair and I refused simply said no you'd be better off with George Westinghouse’s system for that one and it's overlooked but I did refuse and wouldn't put my electric hand to slaughter to running currents through people and frying and cooking and burning oh I'd seen carnage in my day don't get me wrong but by then I couldn't hear and hardly see so I grunted and passed on lots of things and now as I recall even the smell of grazing and new-cut grass had turned from the natural smell to a smell of gasoline and noise and roar the roar of industry and engine and fuel and motor and I guess I started a lot of that and then by the end Ford had me old Henry took me over dismantled everything I did moved my stuff around and got strange with nostalgia and strange with situations and fakery so I stayed in Florida and withered there for a while and we moved about and Burroughs and Ford and me and others we sought refuges among ourselves but now it's gone and so am I" and with that he turned and looked back towards the old rambling factory set so strangely right on the street as if the street had always been there and no responsibility was his for anything but the sounds wafted from him as new musics to ears that had never heard before and the people flocked and visitors were seeking autographs and he did grunt and nod and sign and shake those hands proffered and the city buses rumbled right past him and the cars lined up and we crossed the deadly gasping traffic to go up to the main door at front and past the book stall and the early exhibit with the movie and the dolls that talked and the lights and the chemicals and the labs and the mills and the goldenrod plants for rubber and we stumbled eventually into the industrial entrance for workers where the big wooden time clock still stood on the wall and the vast office doors and the high office lobby and the books and the library but first he stood and stopped and punched his worker's card and we entered and then walked to what was left - the tinfoil phonograph from 1877 the strip kinetograph and electric light the power equipment and below us far below was the posthumous 1940 vault filled with and protecting Edison papers and rare examples of early works Edison Terrace and Alden Street Lakeside Avenue and Main Street Building 5 Main Laboratory machine shops stock rooms offices library and office Building 4 Metallurgical Laboratories to the Gatehouse and to the Water Tower still all extant still there all from trying trying and succeeding to produce a source of light by sending electric current through a material inside a vacuum causing it to glow and only Edison - in his words - "resisted the accepted use of high current and a low-resistance material I saw instead quite clearly that a very small filament of a highly-resistant material would glow with a lower current and last longer my first platinum wire lamp burned an hour or two but I had to improve on that and I did so by improving the vacuum inside the globe and turning to carbonized filaments one lamp right off burned for 13 and 1/2 hours that was really the beginnings as I consider of electric light but even then the bulb was useless outside the laboratory I knew that for people to benefit I would have to incorporate a new system of electric power distribution into established urban areas and that was I really feel a greater achievement than the electric lamp itself for I had to fight the endless gaslight interests and indifferent politicians and to do so I developed a system which I put in the financial district of New York City my Pearl Street Station where I developed a more powerful dynamo than ever before and combined it with a steam engine into one unit which combined worked to produce but only after I also had to design specifically for it a whole array of original devices insulated conduits mains underground junction boxes relay circuits switchboards meters fuses fuse boxes sockets and of course lamps not an easy task mind you but one that I did gladly in order to bring forth the new world as I really saw it as a new world of promise and trembling with light by 1887 I was set Menlo became merely prologue to West Orange's present now past and this is us here now all around us present with light."