1889.
Doctor Ida Bartholomew was forced to complete a fair amount of work to the structures around Menlo Park in the weeks prior to experiment No. 11. Edison had abandoned the Park a year prior, but structures had already fallen into disrepair years before. Squatters had overrun a few of the buildings. She did not need the sheds or the main residence, she did insist on the main laboratory. It was here that power still existed in a capacity to continue her experimentation. To insure its security for the following weeks, she had purchased a questionably functioning shotgun so that a group of vagrants saw the need to vacant the premises and not return.
"This building is still the property of Edison and the National Government, so if you return, you will be duly persecuted [she realized the mistake later] and sent to Federal Prison!"
The Doctor felt no guilt for the escapade, only hating that she was forced to deal with the dregs of society. This was not Allston/Brighton, the laboratory not Boston University. She carried the shotgun on a sling when dusk came.
During the day, she worked feverishly, awaking at dawn after only a few hours of sleep. She was building two transformers according to her colleague, Nikola's [Tesla] specifications. The coil required was perfectly manufactured by a steel producer in Pittsburgh. It was the coil threading that took the bulk of her energies. She wanted the coil structure to maintain the appropriate tensile strength. The electrical power that would flow through these would easily greater than any experiments that were performed here.
At night, she locked every door and window and shut herself into a room that allowed her protection. She sat against the far wall from the door, shotgun in hand. She awoke in the morning, having fallen over sometime over the night. The lack of adequate grooming had taken its toll: Ida would have appeared to any person to be one of the very vagrants she expelled from the lab three weeks prior. Her eyes twitched uncontrollably and she felt that spirits inhabited the structure. They whispered at her while she focused on her work.
Then, without pomp or circumstance: completion. Ida finished the last of the copper finery that induced energy according to the calculation she had made before. The copper filament, the large iron coils, the ceramic capacitors that topped the towering structure: all were in place. She walked around it with an introspection few of her gender possessed [at this time].
She walked about the building, closing up the windows and latching the doors. She blew each candle out and fell against the caster-wheeled chair.
She swung the shotgun to the back of the chair and put her hands to her eyes. They smelled of metal and scoring. Her eyes burned from exhaustion, her body sore from hours and days slumped over the structure. She took in a breath. It felt as if she were born anew.
Moonlight fell through the slats of blinds. She could hear a night bird singing, but from far away. There was a world out there and five weeks had gone by without her in it. She didn't remember the last time she ate. Hunger fell upon her like a ravenous, black cloud. But exhaustion ran the better of her and she fell into a deep sleep.
...
She dreams of Paris. Nikola was there, as was Edison. They were pulling conduit through the streets. The black clouds roiled over the sky, promising a catastrophic lightening storm. She reveled in it, but it did not come. She wandered the dark streets. Shadows whispered to her. An orchestra played under the cobblestone of the Rue Laurent. She stood in the middle of the Rue hoping for the electricity to come. It never did. A locomotive screeched instead, pounding out of the ground, thundering toward her and she awoke.
It took time to realize that two days had passed. The danger of malnutrition threatened her: she had no energy and her body was convulsing from within.
...
No comments:
Post a Comment