AND SPEAKING OF ELECTRICITY...

     I mentioned in my last post that I live in West Orange, New Jersey, the town where Thomas Edison lived and worked for years.  But I didn't mention that my house is about a mile from the Thomas Edison Historical National Park, located in his original laboratory buildings. It's not what most people would think of as a National Park, situated as it is smack in the middle of a suburb, but it is one - park rangers and all!

     Last Tuesday night the Park presented a very unusual concert, and my husband and I were there.  A Tuareg musician named Mdou Moctar performed on electric guitar with his band, which is a rather  exotic experience to witness all by itself. The music had a haunting quality, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.  But here's the kicker: their songs were being recorded live (by a uniformed park ranger) in a crank-operated 1909 recording device onto a wax cylinder - exactly like the ones on which Edison recorded music - and was then played back for the audience's listening pleasure on an antique gramaphone.  Now there's something you don't get to hear every day, right?

      As the ranger very knowledgeably explained it, music creates a disturbance in the air molecules around it.  When the music is directed into the mouth of the horn, its notes create a pattern of air motion which causes a diaphragm at the bottom end of the horn to move in response.  As the diaphragm moves according to the music's pattern, a knife affixed underneath presses onto the rotating wax cylinder over which it hovers, and the pattern of the air's movement is transmitted onto the cylinder, creating a tangible pattern of grooves out of the audible pattern of air waves.  In other words - at least as far as I'm concerned - it's magic.  And then when you remove the wax cylinder and insert it into the bottom of the gramaphone, the whole process is reversed, and the pattern of grooves cut into the cylinder is "read" by a ball rolling over it, and it reverts magically back into air waves that offer us through the amplifier at the top a somewhat buzzy, distorted form of the music we just heard live.

     Here, you can listen for yourself.  Go to https://www.facebook.com/ThomasEdisonNHP/ and scroll down to the May 2nd recording.  And by the way, Mdou Moctar is currently on a United States tour.  Check out the tour dates here, and maybe you can catch a live performance near you.
     I can assure you that none of this means that Edison himself wasn't a real jerk (see my previous blog post), because I've gotten the distinct impression that he was.  But, for sure, he was one of the smartest jerks around.
     Okay.  Since I'm still in an electrical mindset, I'll tell you what I'll do.  Leave me a comment, I'll choose my favorite (assuming/hoping that there will be multiples), and the winner will get my very own like-new copy of "The Last Days of Night," a wonderful historical novel by Graham Moore (who wrote the screenplay for the movie The Imitation Game, among other things) which features all the key players in the Current War whom I mentioned in my last post, not to mention some other fun characters including a lawyer, an opera singer, and ... well, no more spoilers. The book is a delightful read, and all you have to do to get it free is to leave me a delightful comment!