No, Edison did not invent the light-bulb, and Columbus didn’t really discover America, and Amerigo Vespucci certainly didn’t, but don’t try and argue that Europeans didn’t change the new world, or that carbon filaments didn’t create the modern age.It was during an expedition to Battle Lake in the Wyoming territory to view the eclipse of the sun that Edison noticed some threads on his bamboo fishing pole. As the sun went dark, a light bulb, the likes the world had never seen, one that could burn for 1200 hours, appeared above Edison’s head. Good thing he’d already gotten the patent for a carbon filament light bulb, using an inferior filament, months prior.
Those months ago are now one hundred years ago today. A century of electric light. Turn up the lights in here baby extra bright I want them all to see this.
Following soon, the phonograph begets the CD Player begets the ipod begets the tape cassette player, and music streams through our lives for free! Never pay a musician again, until he’s begging on a subway platform. The kinetoscope begets cinema which someone will hopefully record with my flip camera.
Surely the record of this day will survive in some medium one hundred years from now, when light bulbs are the size of atoms and as bright as the sun, and music is projected straight into your brain through your eyes. Surely we shall be plucked from the realm of the forgotten by a new generation charmed by our rustic technology and techniques and enamored of our simple rock music.
“Who were these people?” they shall wonder, “What were they like?”:
They shall remix it and reconsider and fill our feeble attempts with wonders and wonder, from every angle and every vantage, with the sole exception that they can never be in the room.
That will remain for the NEXT generation, the ones with the time machines. That guy in the corner: I think he’s one.
--Dan Kilian
This was the program from The Ks 1/27/2012 show at The Parkside Lounge, which rocked.
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