On another forum I read, there was reference to a “FRANLAB” u-tube segment on a hand made Shelby carbon filament incandescent light bulb from the turn of the 20th Century. Fran is entertaining and informative, I like her videos!
This video brought back memories from Gravity’s Rainbow, in which Thomas Pynchon wrote a sub-story about “Bryon the Bulb”, one of the immortal light bulbs. If you care to read it and its “adult” content, you can find a transcription here: https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html which appears to be a good transcription of the original. Pynchon generates the whole bulb culture including “baby bulb land” and Phoebus, the bulb monitoring system in Switzerland. Possibly Phoebus has a dossier on Fran’s bulb. Here’s a clip:
“At 800 hours—another routine precaution—a Berlin agent is sent out to the opium den to transfer Byron. She is wearing asbestos-lined kid gloves and seven-inch spike heels, no not so she can fit in with the crowd, but so that she can reach that sconce to unscrew Byron. The other bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror.
The word goes out along the Grid. At something close to the speed of light, every bulb, Azos looking down the empty black Bakelite streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every bulb in Europe knows what’s happened. They are silent with impotence, with surrender in the face of struggles they thought were all myth, this common thought humming through pastures of sleeping sheep, down Autobahns and to the bitter ends of coaling piers in the North, . . .
Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies comes in and takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there, but it’s only information, glow-modulated, harmless, nothing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful that Byron once envisioned, back there in his Baby ward, in his innocence.”
After all these years, I still haven’t read “Gravity’s Rainbow,” but I want to. I read “The Crying of Lot 49” in college and I loved it.
I was introduced to Pynchon’s work with “V” in 1970 borrowed from the library at the US Naval Hospital, San Diego. Since that, I’ve read almost everything he’s written.
Gravity’s Rainbow is large and requires some devotion but I’ve read it at least twice and simply pick it up on occasion, open it randomly and start in again.
I do that too with some of my favorite novels: read them again and again, and even open up a random page just for a bite-sized “snack.”
Pynchon is one of many canonical writers that I want to read more of. It’s deliciously tantalizing and yet painful to want to read so many things and know I can never get to them all, no matter how hard I try. I stopped taking an interest in new fiction, even literary fiction, some years ago because I feel like there are enough great books from the last 150 years that I would like to read, and I don’t want even more titles to get in the way of that. : )