It Seemed like Doomsday at the Time - 22 August 2003

Baghdad, the United Nations - what is there to say?

I have two thoughts only about the present state of Iraq. The saddest news is the success of the Iraqis themselves in wrecking the energy grid, the infrastructure, that American and British soldier engineers are working night and day to restore.

The sinister news, it seems to me, is the surge not out of but into Iraq of so many rebel factions and they're uniting into what could soon be seen as an undefeated enemy.

Which leaves the sombre afterthought that perhaps the war against Saddam has just begun.

As for our own trouble, which looks very minor in retrospect, but seemed like Doomsday at the time, I was sitting here, about to turn off the television, when it turned itself off and I thought how awful it's the final collapse of my television set, which has the best image I've ever seen and which they make no more.

Well nothing to be done, it was 10 minutes past my usual nap time - 4.10 exactly - and I got up to turn off my desk lamp, which was the only one lit, it was after all full daylight.

I looked over the top of the lampshade and saw something I'd never seen before - the outline of the filament traced in a glowing red which then faded out.

We tried other switches in other places - nothing. And by then the air in my study began to warm up - the air conditioning off.

So it wasn't my television set, it was my apartment - the top 15th floor. I had to see the supervisor. No I wouldn't - elevator dead.

Happily I said to myself I had recorded my talk, which I do every Thursday from my study here, so I was about to phone the building supervisor when a call came in from my devoted BBC talk producer, Heather Maclean for the last 15 years (she's still a child).

Says Heather: "How are you coping with the brown out? The whole West Side has been hit and, they say, the United Nations."

Minutes later I heard from one who for 26 hours was to be my most dependable reporter - my son, 1800 miles away in the Rockies in Wyoming.

He was then watching and listening to our New York city's mayor Bloomberg, learning that this thing had affected the top north-eastern third of the continent - Toronto across to Detroit, Cleveland, Hartford, Long Island, New York city, New Jersey - too much to take in.

As if your house had been blighted and then you learned from a friend in Berlin that the blackout had taken out Birmingham, Edinburgh, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid.

Soon the distant sympathisers came in. At least ground-based telephones worked.

There's much concern about the lights off - have you got candles?

I explained with steady patience several times that light is the very least of our problems as the old familiar horrors returned - the non-flushing toilets, no water, the food rotting in the refrigerator that doesn't refrigerate.

A day later, by the way, on the orders of the mayors of the afflicted cities, enough food was thrown out of butchers, fishmongers, supermarkets, mini markets to feed Europe for a month.

I won't bore you with the bothersome inconveniences I've recited down the years, even after one of our Long Island half-hour summer storms with crooked blinding lightning and thunder that sounds like the London blitz. And no power.

But don't weep for us, Argentina. Two nonagenarians had a godsend in the shape of our daughter - the reverend from Vermont - who just happened to be staying with us overnight and had flown down, just before airports and trains and subways gave out, with the makings of a delicious dinner.

So, nothing to be done, I went off and snoozed and got up at six when the first London call came in from an old English friend who, bless him, is always the first to be concerned for our welfare at the onset of any personal or public crisis.

And when I'd assured him that we were sweating and also alive, his final comment was: "Well, that's what happens when you have to depend on modern technology."

Modern, my foot, I said to myself.

To him I said: "The modern technology involved was invented 125 years ago by a guy named Edison. It's called an electric bulb."

And then it struck me that maybe there are two generations who never learned at school about Thomas Alva Edison.

It's such a marvellous story and he was such a character that any listener inclined to mutter "everybody knows that" must accept my apologies.

It is with relish and no twitch of condescension I shall tell you about a boy born in a small town in Ohio. His education is easily summarised: three months in a public elementary school.

He was then 12 years of age and for the next three years sold newspapers on trains.

At 15 he got a job working Samuel Morse's new invention, the telegraph.

"What do you do, son?"

"I'm a telegraph operator."

"My, my" or "How's that again?"

What he did best was what he did every minute of his spare time - he played around with all sorts of gadgets and experiments and by the age of 20 he'd collected a monster spaghetti pile of instruments.

When he was 21 Thomas Alva Edison took out his first patent. It was an electrical vote recorder.

That was 1868 and I'd better do the quickest summary of his astonishing career by saying crisply that for 50 years in his workshop in New Jersey he took out 1,093 patents.

His rude health failed him three years after the last application. He died in 1931 at the age of 84.

Now to go back to the young Edison.

When he was 30 he applied to the United States Patent Office for something called a phonograph or speaking machine. The office could find no previous application for anything of the sort.

Then Edison decided to invent something that he felt the public had long been in need of - even if it didn't know it - a light that would replace the universal gas jet which through the 1870s every street, school, shop, theatre, the grandest and the humblest homes, lived by.

It was 1924 and I was 15 when we moved into the first house that had electric light.

I'd better say at once what was the essence of Edison's genius. Not the scope or originality of his ideas so much but how to make a scientific principle work as a convenience.

As I once put it - if he'd discovered gravity, his first thought would be how it could help the farmer and the grocer.

He could admire, as much as anyone, the delicate workmanship of a Swiss watch but how do you make a dollar watch?

So while gaslight had been in a few public places replaced by huge, clumsy arc lights, Edison told two assistants in his home and home made laboratory - I want a cheap filament in a bulk that will give electric light to the ordinary householder.

The gas companies were much amused, as if a mad scientist today had promised a private missile for round trips to the moon for every automobile owner.

The basic problem was what sort of conductor could carry a steady flow of current for an infinite time.

Every metal he tried - platinum, chromium, iridium - over-heated or oxidised or required a huge current.

So he started on a variety of materials. It would take several years but Edison had endless patience.

He tried every sort of paper, fibre, bark, cork, lemon peel.

In disgust one disheartened day he plucked a hair from his assistant's beard. He tried almost anything you can touch and see.

"All I'm looking for," he wrote to a friend, "is a tiny, high-resistance filament that will burn on and on in a vacuum."

Eventually he carbonised a thread of sewing cotton and it stayed alight for 45 hours. He was, he said, encouraged.

And he began to test 6,000 vegetable fibres - didn't work.

At last the tiny jewel of a conductor from a Japanese bamboo. It lasted a thousand hours.

the world would, after many years of scepticism and disbelief, the world would be lit by electricity.

It took a long time to catch on. Hysteria overtook a Fifth Avenue hostess - one of the first to install it - when two crossed wires started a fire.

The first ever theatrical performance by electric light was of still the most delicious comic musical in our language - Iolanthe.

Edison was present to supervise and later be the guest of honour at a backstage supper.

During the interval - the intermission - the filaments turned red and dimmed.

Edison rushed down to the cellar, ripped off his dress suit and shovelled enough coal to maintain the steam pressure - and the lights - throughout the evening.

And so it came about, as St Luke might have written, that the scribe did look over his desk lamp and saw that the filament was a red glowing outline that faded into darkness and the scribe remembered Thomas Alva stripped to the waist, mightily shovelling coal while his guest toasted his name above stairs.

"And so," the scribe said, "I will talk about him."

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