1 Block 1 LA 4/SE 4 Level 4 November 24, 2014 Let There Be Light I work for Thomas Edison at his laboratories in Menlo Park, New Jersey, at least I will until this fall when things are going to change for me. I’d like to say I’m an apprentice but, really, Edison’s apprentices are much more educated and older and smarter than I am. I’m sixteen years and figured I was doing well to get as far as high school. However, it seems like everyone else at Menlo Park has studied at a university. I’m the one who gets to clean up the messes, sweep the shop, fetch the coffee and do whatever else Edison and his employees ask me to do. It may seem like my job is all boring, mind­numbing drudgery, but there’s a lot to be learned by listening to the heated discussions between a brilliant inventor and his very smart employees while sweeping the floors. And I’m all ears. I was lucky to get this job and leave my mother with one less mouth to feed. We’re probably not that different from many families, luckier than some, unluckier than others. My family is from farming country in rural New Jersey. If you know anything about farming, then you may know that farmers in New Jersey hit hard times during the 1850’s. We figured we were doing well if we had food for every meal and a warm place home. My parents got married a few years before the Civil War. By the time my dad joined the Union Army, my three older sisters had been born. I came along during the war, followed by three more sisters once the war was over. My dad was one of the lucky ones in that he actually came home from the war. What we didn’t know at the time was that he’d caught malaria. He just seemed to catch a 2 fever with chills and sweats pretty often. I remember him as always being tired and complaining of headaches. When I was ten years old, my dad died. My mom did the best she could with help from her family but they didn’t have much either and the girls couldn’t really get jobs and earn money. We all had pitched in around the farm as soon as we could but when I got the chance to get a job, any job, elsewhere, I took it. You may wonder how a farm boy like me ended up working for the great inventor Thomas Edison. Dumb luck, I guess. One of my uncles supplied Menlo Park with food for their kitchens. He heard that they were looking for a boy to do the rough chores, run errands, and clean the laboratories. He brought me along to ask for the job and I got it. I get a tiny room at the Menlo Park boarding house as well as board and I have the chance to earn a little bit money for doing the extra odd job, money that I send home to my mother. When I came here I was only looking for a job, someway to help my mother, but inventing is an exciting business. And 1878 was a good time to be an inventor, it seems. When I got here in late 1877, Edison had just invented the phonograph, a machine that lets a person talk into a cone that was attached to a pin that would leave grooves on paper or foil wrapped around wood. It sounds crazy but it records what you say and plays it back. The first commercial telephone service opened this year, a good year for Mr. Alexander Graham Bell. What Edison and everyone in Menlo Park have been working on for a while now is the light bulb. Now light bulbs have been around for a while. The first one was invented more than 70 years ago by a British man name Humphry Davy. What Mr. Davy did was connect carbon to a battery by some wires causing the carbon to glow. The problem was that it burnt itself out very quickly and the light was too bright. Mr. Edison is trying to make a lightbulb that will last a long time without burning out, make a light that is pleasing to look at and is inexpensive enough to make that large quantities can be made and people can buy them. 3 I certainly didn’t learn any of this in school. I wasn’t even sure what many of the objects in the lab were or were used for. Fortunately for me, many of the men who work for Mr. Edison like to explain things to me. Sometimes I think they’re talking to themselves as much as they are to me. There are three main employees working on the light bulb project, each with their own specialty. Charles Batchelor is a mechanic who came over from London. He’s the one who would build fix or alter a device if needed. Mr Batchelor learned his mechanics skills as an apprentice. Francis Upton is the math and physics specialist in the group. He’s also the one who spent the most time in school having gotten a degree from Bowdoin, somewhere in Maine, and then going graduate work at Princeton here in New Jersey and more in Germany. The third guy I have a hard time understanding and he speaks to me the least. That John Kruesi a machinist from Switzerland. He’s apparently a wizard at deciphering Mr. Edison’s drawings. But he’s kind of gruff so I stay out of his way as much as possible. Mr. Upton is pretty nice to me. He’s the one who is always explaining why something does or doesn’t work from a science standpoint. It often takes me a lot of thinking and some questions, if Mr. Upton has the time, to understand what he’s saying. Mr. Batchelor has been good about showing me the tools and explaining what all the different bits and pieces do. Between the two the, Mr. Upton will be telling me why aluminum wouldn’t make a good filament, while Mr. Batchelor would be telling me how to work with it. The group has been working on the light bulb problem for a while now and they’re putting in long hours. I know because I have stay as long as there is someone working in the lab. There are three problems that need to be solved all at the same time for light bulbs to be a generally useful invention. One is, of course, the type of material to use for the filament. The second is how to keep the filament away from the oxygen in the air which causes it to 4 burn out quickly. The third is how to distribute the power to the bulbs economically, and that’s not just to a single light bulb but how to get power to the building or street where the light bulb is supposed to be installed. The men in Mr. Edison’s lab are working on the first two and I get to watch an invention in progress. Mr. Upton explained that how long a light bulb will burn depends not only on the type of material the filament is made of but also what surrounds the filament. I didn’t understand that at first and Mr. Upton saw my puzzled look. It turns that the oxygen in air causes the filament to burn out quickly. One thing that was tried was to put the filament in a glass tube filled with nitrogen. That didn’t work that well either. The next step was to try to create a vacuum in the light bulb. Partial vacuums were better than none but the filaments still burned out too quickly. Now Mr. Edison and Mr. Batchelor are working on getting a better vacuum in the glass tube that the filament is in. Mr. Edison figured out how to make a better vacuum by heating the light bulb and pumping out the air at the same time. A better vacuum also reduced the problem of blackening, some of the filaments would leave a layer of soot on the inside of the light bulb when they burned. If the inside is black, the light can’t get through. Mr. Batchelor told me that the pumps used to create the vacuum hadn’t gotten much better in recent years and that also helped improve the light bulb. Sometimes when Mr. Batchelor is explaining things to me while he works, he has me fetch him tools or lend him a third hand to hold something. All sorts of materials have been tried as a filament. Mr. Upton listed some of the ones that had been tried with no to mixed success. Platinum had been tried but blackened the inside of the bulb. A better vacuum might help that but platinum is really expensive anyway. Mr. Edison’s first filament was sewing thread, plain, ordinary sewing thread that he carbonized. Imagine that! Mr. Edison has the lab making carbon filaments out of papers coiled 5 in a variety of ways, out of wood splints, and out of threads made out of cotton and linen.​
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It sounds to me like he’s just looking around at what he has and is trying it out. Mr. Upton laughs at me because I’ve started bringing him things to ask if there’s any chance they might make a good filament. If cotton works, maybe other plants would too. At least that’s what I think. And it seems that I may have learned that from watching Mr. Edison and his men. With all the machines running all the time in the lab, it gets very hot in there. Mr. Edison is working at the bench, sweat running down his face. He calls for me to bring him something to cool him off. In my box with all the items I’ve collected, there is a fan I found. It’s rather pretty but coming apart a bit. However, it should do the trick so I hand it to Mr. Edison. Mr. Edison seems to have just finished working on one of the filaments when I hand him the fan. He sighs in aggravation, opens the fan and begins to fan himself, a piece of bamboo thread trailing from the top of the fan. Mr. Edison looks at the piece of thread, then looks at me and cuts that bamboo thread from the fan. Mr. Edison says, “Thanks, boy. We haven’t tried this type of thread yet.” That bamboo thread wasn’t the filament in Edison’s first commercial light bulb but it turned out to be much better than that in those first light bulbs and became the filament in improved versions of the light bulb. That thread also improved me. Mr. Edison and his men continued to teach and encourage me. Now I’ve learned enough to go to college and with good recommendations, I’ve been accepted to Carleton College. Light bulbs in every house are going to change the world, and light bulbs have changed my life.