Posts tagged History
“ For practical purposes, the thermolamp was a flop. Lebon installed one in his Paris house and opened it to the public, charging three francs admission. It aroused the same sort of interest as William Trevithick’s steam engine. At roughly the same time in England, Trevithick put on public display a steam locomotive driving around in a circle, and also charged for admission. It is one of the ironies of history that the two arguably most important innovations of the 19th century first appeared in public as something like a circus act.”
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The industrialization of Light in the 19th Century
Philipe Lebon’s thermolamp was a self-contained natural gas hearth, a precursor to centralized heating and power.
Reading this book, it’s amazing how the growth and evolution of computing parallels that of artificial lighting. In a nutshell: first they emerge as self-contained solutions for big businesses, then they shrink to self-contained products used by individual early adopters, and finally the bulk of the work is centralized at gasworks and server farms, respectively. The effects of each shift are similar as well.
History as a List
NPR and Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich runs with my Frontiers through the Ages thought experiment, spinning it into a game we can play everywhere.
This makes my week.
