Sep. 21st, 2001
Edison was l33t!
Sep. 21st, 2001 09:58 pmI'm reading The Victorian Internet, a book about the telegraph, and the connections it made possible.
There are a lot of good one-paragraph stories in here, and many of them are about Thomas Edison. He proposed to his second wife in Morse code, by tapping her hand. And once a snooty British telegraph office tried to haze him by making him receive from a way fast sender, who would make any mortal operator break down and tear his hair out. But Edison received comfortably at 25, 30, even 35 words a minute, and at the end of his shift he responded, "Why don't you use your other foot?"
He was the 19th century embodiment of today's graveyard-shift hacker type geeks who live on vending machine food and experiment with the machinery when everyone else has gone home. Only instead of vending machine food, it was "a frugal diet of apple pie washed down with vast amounts of coffee."
There are a lot of good one-paragraph stories in here, and many of them are about Thomas Edison. He proposed to his second wife in Morse code, by tapping her hand. And once a snooty British telegraph office tried to haze him by making him receive from a way fast sender, who would make any mortal operator break down and tear his hair out. But Edison received comfortably at 25, 30, even 35 words a minute, and at the end of his shift he responded, "Why don't you use your other foot?"
He was the 19th century embodiment of today's graveyard-shift hacker type geeks who live on vending machine food and experiment with the machinery when everyone else has gone home. Only instead of vending machine food, it was "a frugal diet of apple pie washed down with vast amounts of coffee."