Edison set up his research laboratory in Menlo Park, now part of Edison Township, New Jersey. This is where he invented the phonograph and the light bulb. He later moved his home and factories to West Orange, NJ. Nothing is left of his Menlo Park facility. It was already in ruins when Henry Ford bought what was left and moved it to Michigan to be part of the Henry Ford Museum.
On the site today is a tower and a light bulb model you see in the pictures below. The light bulb is the image of invention. Edison’s inventions in general changed the way we live. Chrissy and I have been visiting Newport, RI and the houses of the rich and famous. They were early adopters of electric lighting. Before that, in a world lit only by sunlight and fire, interior spaces were dark most of the time. You could use candles or kerosene, but it was still pretty dim and you faced the problems of smoke and dangers of fire.
The light bulb was not Edison’s first invention. His first invention was a machine that recorded Morse code. It allowed the much more rapid transmission of telegraph messages. When Edison played it back, he noticed that it made sound and got the idea that he could record other sounds.
The first picture below is the iconic light bulb. Next is the tower that marks the spot of the old Menlo Park laboratory. The third picture is Edison’s chair. Henry Ford bought it, nailed it to the floor and had the chair and the surrounding floor shipped to his collection in Michigan. The last picture is Greenfield Village, part of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. It is a collect of buildings typical of America in the turn of the century. The last two picture are from an earlier trip. Link to that is here.
We went to West Orange, NJ to look into innovation and Thomas Edison. Edison invented a practical light bulb, the phonograph & the motion picture camera. At least that is what I learned in school. Since then, I have come to understand that invention or discovery are rarely that simple. No one individual is responsible. Rather, many factors come together that enable the leap.
Progress comes as punctuated equilibrium. We certainly credit Edison with amazing creativity, but he sprung from the same fertile soil that produced the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone & George Westinghouse among many others. We call them inventors, but maybe a better term is innovators, since they bring together lots of ideas and people and put them together in different ways. That is where the “fertile soil” comes in. When you get a bunch of innovators together, they innovate as the ideas bounce around, mutate, evolve and improve. That is why giving credit to a single inventor is so hard. All that aside, Edison was a great inventor and a great innovator as an individual. If he depended on the ecology of innovation, he was a big part of that ecological system. He understood this better than most. He knew great innovations often come in a flash of innovation … followed by years of hard work to make them practical. Edison was practical. He organized a team for innovation. He invented a system for invention just as Henry Ford invented a process for mass production. You could say that those ideas were “out there” but it took someone to make them work.
Historians today mostly reject and even disparage the “great man theory” and they are right to do so. For some of the reasons I mentioned above, the great man theory does not work to explain history. However, the “shit happens” theory is also unsatisfying. Innovation can happen only when conditions are ripe, but ripe conditions do not guarantee innovation and the innovators set the direction, the path of progress. To the extent that innovations are path dependent, after a few steps the great individuals have indeed made history different than it would otherwise have been. So the great man theory is not wrong, just incomplete. Edison was one of those great men who changed the direction of history. Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. My pictures show Edison’s factory in West Orange. Next is the workshop floor. Notice the belts. The machines did not have their own power, but rather ran off the mechanical power overhead transmitted by the belts. The third picture is Edison’s music room. He recorded music there, but lost market share because he refused to hire big names. He was more concerned with technical quality than with star quality. The last photo is an Edison phonograph. The picture is one I took a while back at the Henry Ford Museum. I will include a link to that trip in the comments section and say a little more about Edison in a new post.
It took longer than I thought to drive through Connecticut and New York to get to New Jersey. It was good most of the way. Who knew there could be traffic in the middle of the day in and around NYC? My problem getting stuck in traffic is not that I need to be anywhere in particular but rather that I drink lots of Coke-Zero and have to be somewhere with a bathroom. We finally got an opening just inside New Jersey. I found out that you are not allowed pump your own gas in NJ. There is evidently a law against it.
I noticed that the sound walls along the highway in Connecticut were made of wood. This is a good idea. Wood is easy to work, 100% renewable and it tends to absorb sound better than a hard concrete or steel wall. Wood is good.
Everything we know about New Jersey culture comes from watching TV, so it must be 100% accurate and we wanted to have the authentic experience. We found an authentic looking pizza place (see the picture). I know that Brooklyn is in New York, not New Jersey, but I figured close enough. They had a special on calzone and both of us ordered that. They were very big, each one enough for two. I boldly finished mine (Anyone can eat when he is hungry, but it takes a real man to continue after he is full.) Chrissy left half of hers.
We are staying at Fairfield Inn in Edison, NJ. I like Fairfield Inn. They are nice but still inexpensive. I particularly like the mini-suites. If I build a house of my own, I would build a mini-suite like this for one of the rooms.
Still in Newport looking at the mansions of the formerly rich and famous. Among the places we visited was “The Breakers” one of the Vanderbilt homes. I know it is fashionable to criticize these fat cats, but they did built fortunes and patronize the arts. Alfred Vanderbilt was aboard the Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-Boat in 1915. After helping other passengers get into lifeboats, he gave his own life preserver and place in the boat to a young mother. I could not picture many of today’s rich celebrities doing something similar.
Anyway, I do not think it really was so much fun to be rich in the Gilded Age. Forget about the office work, parties were hard work. Keeping up with social engagements must have been deadly.
I met an ambitious young man a few years ago whose goal in life was to get rich. He was a smart guy and an extremely hard worker. He was on his way to success in his life venture when he died of a heart attack at the age of 42. Sic transit gloria mundi is only one lesson from his short life and not the one I thought most important.
“Why do you want to be rich?” I asked him, “What do you want so much?” He explained that the joy of being rich is that you would need to own almost nothing. It makes sense when you think about it. If you are really rich you can rent whatever you want, exactly what you want when you want it. Owning anything is a problem. When you are really rich you just use stuff.
My pictures show some of the opulence. The last picture is the bathroom. Consider, this is the home of one of the richest men in the world, but he still has a bathroom most of us would find inadequate. Progress is great. An ordinary guy today can live better overall than the rich guys of the past. Sure, you don’t have the opulent house, but you have TVs, computers and much better health care … and a better bathroom.
Next day
We are still in Newport, RI visiting mansions of the Gilded Age. Their palaces remind me a lot of hotels. There is lot of lobby there. No doubt these rich guys had it made, but if you compare their actual lifestyles – absent the status – with my lifestyle, I am much better off. I can travel faster and more freely. My medical care is way better. I have access to many more books than their libraries could hold. My entertainment options are much expanded. My bathrooms are nicer, my water cleaner and my clothes of higher quality. The last one, I know, will be surprising, but consider the no-iron cotton I can have among other things. Technological progress helps the poor much more than the rich, as the luxuries they had have become common to us today.
Consider the armies of servants these guys employed. What did they do? Most of them did stuff now done by machines or not needed. I mentioned the iron-free cotton. They had to employ lots of people to keep their clothes ironed.They had ice boxes stocked by servants. e have refrigerators that just work.
We are stayed at Marriott in Newport, pictured below. I have access to much greater luxury than Vanderbilt. My room is smaller than his, but more pleasant. I have better heat and air conditioning. My lights are brighter. I have TV and Internet and the materials are higher quality. When we drive away in our ordinary Toyota, it will be a much better vehicle than Vanderbilt could have owned. My car just works. Vanderbilt needed a team of servants to keep his carriages and car running. I will be able to drive over paved roads, instead of those bumpy trails he had to use. The technology I enjoy are worth dozens of his servants. Before 1800, the whole world was poor. The Great Enrichment created lots of possibilities. The 20th Century was one of even greater material progress, more for the poor than the rich. I live better than Vanderbilt, but his lifestyle was not that much worse than mine. The poor of those days, however, were miserable. Lucky to be born in the 20th Century and in the USA. Everything else is just background.
My pictures show the Marriott lobby and the Vanderbilt mansion foyer (lobby). Vanderbilt’s is certainly more opulent. Marriott’s is more functional and, IMO, nicer.
Next Day
We went to a three more mansions today. I learned that Victorian homes were/are dark and that my camera does not take pictures well in low light, no matter how hard I try to hold still. If you can cut through the envy, you realize that some of these fat cats were admirable. The one I liked is George Peabody Wetmore. His home was Chateau Sur Mer. His father made a fortune in the China trade, so George inherited the business and we cannot credit him with building wealth. He did maintain it and use it wisely. He was well educated and actively studied many subjects. He served in the Senate and as Governor of Rhode Island; he worked on the design committees of many of the monuments in Washington and on a variety of charitable causes. Recall that he did not NEED to do anything. He took his wealth and position seriously and worked to be a good man and a useful citizen, but often declined recognition and honors. Consider today’s rich and famous in contrast. Can we imagine Kanye or the Kardashians being useful and modest? Anyway, I enjoyed visiting his house and the grounds. He was a tree lover and the ground still feature a variety of fine trees. My pictures show some of them. First is an English oak. Next is a grove of Japanese cedars. Third are fern leaf beech and last is an English elm.
Nothing lasts forever. Trees live a long time, but they too succumb. I noticed the many beautiful beech trees in Newport. I also noticed that they were not all in the best of condition. A quick research confirmed.
The beech trees were planted during the gilded age, about 120 years ago. The mansion builders, or at least their landscape architects, loved the beech trees and for good reason. They are truly beautiful and stately trees. Many are the European variety of beech. In their Central European forests home they live around 400 years. although they rarely do. In Newport, they do not make it so long. There are lots of reasons. One is that the beech trees have shallow roots and any kind of traffic on them causes them distress. Anyway, they are nearing the end of their generation.
Newport has a couple of options. They can try to save the old trees, or they can replace them. A combination of both makes sense. It is great to keep the magnificent old trees alive as long as possible. On the other hand, we do not want to create a geriatric ward of trees.
European beeches come in a couple varieties. The copper beech is popular because of its reddish leaves, but it doesn’t grow as big. There is an American beech, also a beautiful large tree. We have lots of them on the farm. The American an European beech look very similar. The European variety has somewhat more rounded leaves and tends to be stouter, while its American cousin is taller. European and American plants and animals are often similar because the continents were connected until the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago.
Beech have a very interesting ecology. They are shade tolerant and disturbance adverse, so you find them naturally only in places that have been left alone, no fire or other disruption, for a fair amount of time. In Europe, beech forests tend to predominate and thrive in places that were cleared by neolithic farmers. We are talking human induced changes from the stone age, that is how long these factors can persist. It is also interesting to note, however, that these are not adverse changes.
Wisconsin is the western edge of the beech range and it is very interesting in Milwaukee, which is both on the western and southern edge. Beech trees grow naturally only as far as the fog from Lake Michigan reaches. I know this makes sense only to those in Milwaukee, but let me explain. Beech trees grow in Grant Park, but they do not reach even very far away from Lake Drive. That is how narrow their range. If you go as far west as Howell Avenue, you will find no naturally regenerating beech trees. We are talking a natural range of of maybe only 1000 yards from Lake Michigan. Fascinating, IMO.
My pictures are some of the trees in Newport, except for the last, which is a big American beech I took in Ohio. I will attach an article re in the comments second. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/science/25beeches.html
When King George VI visited Hyde Park, Mrs Roosevelt (mother Sara) wanted to take down a collections of revolutionary cartoons ridiculing the British monarch. Somebody forgot and when the King & Queen came in, they seemed to go immediately to the wall with the cartoons.
The King looked for a while and then said, something like, “Wonderful drawings. I see some I don’t have in my collections.” The guy had class.
My other picture is the Goulash Place in Danbury. It is unrelated to the Hyde Park. We stopped there and had Goulash. It was good, but I think it is hard to run a restaurant with a menu consisting mostly of Goulash and foods that go with Goulash.
The first half of the 20th Century was the heroic age of American conservation. The Forest Service was founded in 1905, the National Park Service in 1916. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) came out of the New Deal. The 1940s brought the American Tree Farm System (ATFS) and Aldo Leopold’s land ethic described in the “Sand County Almanac.”
I chose to use the term heroic age specifically and not golden age. Heroic ages produce the good stories and the … heroes, but they are not pleasant for the people living through them. Heroic times require heroes and heroic effort precisely because time are so tough. The push toward conservation was provoked by severe ecological disasters. A series of disastrous forest fires culminating in the Great Fire of 1910, called variously the “Big Burn” or the “Big Blow-up.” Call it what you will, it burned about three million acres and killed 87 people, mostly firefighters. Even w/o it burning up, experts predicted that we would run out of wood within a few decades. The horrors of the dust bowl, the worse hard time, have entered the mainstream American imagination, but we usually fair to understand the extent of the loss of soil and productivity. Yes, the heroic age of conservation was a dark, dusty and dangerous time and people who thought deeply about the environment probably thought it would only get worse.
We have come a long way, but some of the solutions from the heroic age have become burdens today. Conservation heroes such as both Roosevelts and Gifford Pinchot used warlike metaphors to describe the fight to improve the environment. I just did it too, since it is hard to get away from their formulation. But then the concept of struggle is big in any heroic narratives.
One of the things Pinchot did was to put fire in the role of enemy of the forest. It is easy to criticize this as a mistake but it made sense at the time. He was struggling to get acceptance for the Forest Service and for conservation more generally. America’s recent experience with fire made it easy to identify this destructive and deadly force as the enemy. Ordinary people could easily see the need to protect forests from the destruction. It worked too well and for more than a half century, we fought to keep fire out. This fundamentally changed the ecology of the ecosystems and built up excess fuel that fuel leading to even more disastrous fires.
There is no enemy and no struggle when you think systemically and ecologically. Factors are more or less appropriate contingent upon the situation at hand. Moreover, the situation is constantly changing, making the appropriate response different ever time. The thing you need to eradicate today may be the thing you propagate tomorrow. It is further complicated by the obvious fact that we alter the situation by working with it, even by just looking at it.
Anyway, these are some more of my thoughts from Hyde Park. You see what you look for. I could talk about FDR’s social or economic reforms, but I still see the conservationist. My first picture is the Hudson Valley near Hyde Park. Next is a collection of New Deal posters about the National Parks. These posters were made as part of the Federal Arts Project, part of the WPA. After that is FDR talking to Gifford Pinchot and finally is me listening to a “fireside chat” in a reproduction of a 1930s kitchen.
Franklin Roosevelt was the most consequential president of the 20th Century and our United States would be very different w/o him. Studying FDR is one of my hobbies. He was a fantastically complex and interesting character. He broke all the rules of leadership and yet did it better than anyone else in this century. I have read dozens of books featuring or actual biographies. Of course, I have watched Roosevelt on “The American Experience” and the Ken Burns’ series. So I thought it was time to see his house at Hyde Park.
On the drive up from Virginia, we listened to the audiobook “FDR” by Jean Edward Smith. I listened to it before but it was good to hear it again and let CJ hear it for the first time. There was a lot to this man but here I want to address a particular part of his personal leadership style.
Roosevelt was a tree-loving conservationist. You can certainly perceive this when you look around his estate at Hyde Park. He planted thousands of trees and even described himself as a tree farmer. The Civilian Conservation Corps was his favorite creation. I think that his appreciation of trees, soil and water influenced, permeated, his leadership style. He took an ecological approach to policy. He tried things, adapted the good parts, abandoned the bad ones and tried something else, i.e. try, observe, learn, and try again. It was an evolutionary process of variation and selection. FDR admitted that he did not know what outcomes would be. He commonly violated the ostensible rules of leadership by assigning many people to overlapping or even the same tasks and then letting them adapt to each other and to developing needs. Moreover, he understood that he needed to let things develop and not over control. He chose good people and usually let them do their jobs, but he was not indolent. He was monitoring the system, in an ecological way, i.e. not concerned with the details of the things but the seams and relationships among them. As a tree-loving conservationist myself, I think I recognize this style and its origins. Maybe I am reading too much into this, projecting too much, but it makes sense to me. FDR’s style is the indirect, development-systemic oriented logic of the ecosystem.
One side note – FDR started working on conservation from his first term in the NY Senate. He got appointed to the fish and game committee and reworked the rules. But he lost a fight with the timber industry when he tried to regulation timber cutting on private land. It was good he lost. His intentions were good but his understanding was flawed. Roosevelt introduced a bill in 1912 (The Roosevelt-Jones bill) session that would make it illegal to cut trees smaller than a certain size. In this, he was extrapolating from what they do with fish. You let the little fish go so that they can grow into big fish. Trees do not work like this. Some trees are just small and will never get any bigger. They are small for genetic or competitive reasons, but either way it is wise to cut them. Beyond that, you may need to clear largish areas – big trees and small – in order to create proper ecological conditions for particular species.
My first picture shows Chrissy sitting with Franklin & Eleanor. The next picture is a wonderful oak tree in front of a hay field. FDR postulated that the hay field was cleared for a long time, even before settlement by the Dutch, because the oak trees, like this one, had developed that open branching structure characteristic of a tree growing in open conditions. The picture after that are a series of New Deal posters talking about conservation and the last picture shows a really big hemlock tree. You would almost never find a hemlock naturally growing in the open like that. This hemlock has been part of a garden for more than a couple centuries. Save
I wanted to stop off at the place where Washington ended the Newburgh conspiracy, so I went to where I thought it was, i.e. Washington’s headquarters in Newburgh. I found a nice museum and a beautiful location, but not the site. Seems the actual conspiracy took place at New Windsor Cantonment, about five miles away. The woman at Washington’s HQ assured me that Washington had prepared his presentation in the building pictured. The building at the Cantonment has been reconstructed, but I figured that I got close enough.
I will attach background on Newburgh in the comments section. Please read it. It is one of the most important instances in American history. Washington’s action and his character turned the tide and prevented America debouching into the authoritarian dictatorship that usually follows successful revolution.
Washington was an extraordinarily disciplined man. Character to Washington was something to be build over a lifetime. He was very sensitive to this and played his role well. In the case of the Newburgh Conspiracy, Washington knew his speech alone would be insufficient. He needed to lean on his character and employ drama, which he did wonderfully. I will include a clip from a miniseries on Washington. It is worth watching in general, but go to 18 minutes and watch the Newburgh part.
My pictures are from Washington’s HQ and the museum. It was raining hard, so I didn’t my outside picture was a bit hasty. Notice the beautiful horse chestnut next to Washington’s HQ. The log is part of a boom that closed the Hudson so the British fleet could not divide the colonies.
Some pictures from my tree farm visits – May 4, 2016. My new plantation is scary. We planted 46 acres: 15 longleaf & the rest loblolly. It is hard to find the little trees. But I remember how hard it was with the first forests in 2005. They are there (I hope). I found some. I also took some pictures of the 2012 longleaf and the loblolly plantations.
The first picture shows new growth on the 2012 longleaf. Next shows loblolly that will be twenty-years old this year. They were thinned in 2010/11 & we will thin again in 2017/18. Third picture is our new cut-over with loblolly in background. There are little trees in there, but they are hard to see. Finally is a picture of a loblolly among the longleaf. I cut it back a few months ago (I have to clip out the loblolly, since they will crowd out the longleaf.) Loblolly is one of the few pines that will sprout from stumps.
A few more pictures from the May 4, 2016 tree farm visit. The first is a picture of the beech-wood from the stream management zone (SMZ) We protect the water by not cutting near streams and wetlands. Since these places are uncut & generally moist, after a while you get beech-maple forests.
Beech will Not reproduce in full sunlight, so they only show up after trees have been on the land for a long time.
This is contrast to pine, which will not reproduce in their own shade. This you can see in my second picture. Notice the pines in the overstory and none in the understory.
Oaks are in between. They do not like to grow in the shade like the beech, but they also do not need or want full sun like the pines. Growing oaks requires “openings” of at least a few acres. Also oaks can stand some fire. Beech have thin bark and most fires will kills them. Southern pine are actually fire dependent in nature. So you need to have a different strategy for each ecosystem sustainability. If you want beech-maples, cut a few trees or none. If you want oaks, clear a patchworks and maybe allow some fire. If you want pine, you need to clear cut and burn. Each is appropriate in its own way.
Oaks enjoyed a much better environment a couple centuries ago, when land was cleared and sometimes forests filled in along property lines. It was sunny, but not too much. Ironically both preservation and exploitation are bad for oaks.
However, I planted a few among my longleaf. They can stand some burning and I think it will be a nice complementary landscape. I got twenty-five bur oak and interspersed them. They are the type of oaks Aldo Leopold talks about in the fire-dependent oak-opening ecosystems. The last picture is my crimson clover. I just think it is pretty.
Finally – the first picture is a little ravine near one of the roads. The road was going to wash into it, so I got 20 tons of rip-rap and made the boys put it in by hand. They still remember that day’s work with great fondness.
The next picture is our wires. Dominion Power in its generosity has an easement of eight acres of my land. We cannot grow trees but the hunt club plants wildlife plots. It is good for the animals.
The third picture is a lonely longleaf seedling that I could find, since there was nothing else growing near it. Hope it survives. I think it will. It has the advantage of being in a place of its own. It will stay in that “grass stage” for a couple years and then (we hope) shoot up like the ones you saw in the previous posts and in the final photo, which is my longleaf panorama. You can see they are taller than the grass now. The danger to them now is ice storms. Their long needles weight them down. This will be a hazard for the next five years. The really terrible ice storms are uncommon. We trust in the goodness of the Lord and the principles of probability to keep them safe.
