Oct 17 2009
What Are You Looking At?
Short of the quick video test a few days ago, it’s been more than a few weeks since I’ve taken the time to write, let alone manage, anything on this site. Home & garage projects had been put on hold, and will continue to be for the next couple of weeks. My role in the maintenance outage at work has come to its anticipated end and the schedule of a shift-worker being what it is, I go on night-shift after this one day off. A day-and-a-half after the nights, I switch back to days. It’s just a way of life.
But I thought I’d take a minute to see what everyone’s been doing here, since even though I’m not up to anything in the outside world this site is still somehow managing around 30 hits a day (see right sidebar)… which is quite humbling to me.
Back in the early days of the Internet, web geeks kept a series of back-end, unpublished pages to collect bits of information like the quantity of hits to their sites, where the visitors were coming from, what they were reading, etc. These were our “web logs” (later shortened to “blogs”) and we’d share them electronically with other like-minded individuals. Here’s a small sampling of one of mine at the time of this writing.
I never would’ve thought that sharing pictures of a home-made tractor or my wind turbine with friends would be getting regular attention from places like India, Belieze, or Chad, but they do. It’s all in the same spirit of long distance electronic communication that stemmed from William Sturgeon’s 1825 invention which allowed him to pick up 9lbs with a battery & a 7 ounce piece of iron wound with wires.
Those of you who are into power generation and the like know all-to-well & can freely take that little “electromagnet” invention down a whole equally viable path involving Tesla & Edison and I’d love to read some of your comments. You may also wonder how I make a connection between the discovery of the electromagnet and this or any other blog. It’s like this:
Joseph Henry sent an electrical current through a mile+ of wires using Sturgeon’s invention at the other end to strike a bell. But while the painter Samuel Morse was in Washington doing a portrait of the “marquis de Lafayette” a horse messenger delivered a one line letter from his father reading, “Your wife is dead.” By the time he arrived home, she was already buried.
Heartbroken in the knowledge of her failing health and comfortless death, he turned from painting to accomplish a method of long distance communication, eventually working with Henry’s discovery to come up with the the single-wire telegraph.
Wanting to improve on Morse’s work, Alexander Graham Bell visited with with Henry, who was then director of the Smithsonian Institution, to seek his advice. When Bell said that he did not have the necessary knowledge, Henry replied, “Get it!”
That statement from an esteemed predecessor was all the encouragement Bell needed to persevere. Even though he did not have the equipment nor the ability to create a working model to continue the experiments on his “harmonic telegraph” at the time, he did see the successful transformation of his idea to the physical in 1876 and by 1922 the DX’ing shortwave Hams decided that they didn’t even need wires between their telegraph stations.
Every discovery or invention has a person with a story behind it and rarely, if ever, do people accomplish great things by themselves. It is that very same spirit of building on what we learn from those before us that has flowed from that electromagnet and its inspiration to blogs to Twitter and on. It’s the same technology – the practical application of science to commerce or industry – that enables a remote transmitter to send status data to an operator or database that allows a concept like Twitter to grow exponentially. What will the next person who relentlessly pursues growth do with it?
There will always be people learning from those before them and trying to improve the situation, giving solid credit and thanks to those who provided information, ideas or support. I have to wonder what my kids will be doing for communication, having never known a world without the Internet (talk about collaboration!) but I have no doubts the spirit of invention hasn’t changed since the beginning of time.
Don’t tell me “the sky’s the limit” when there are footprints on the moon.
Leigh and I were just sitting and remembering when we were running our first bootleg, Linux-based server out of our basement in Malaga, NJ. Our first site was called, originally enough, TheBasement.com and it was like the AM days of the Internet; we just hacked our way in and were broadcasting. When I went to bed, we’d shut down. That name has long since become some pseudo music site once we let go of it.