{"id":4308,"date":"2020-11-21T18:33:56","date_gmt":"2020-11-22T02:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/?p=4308"},"modified":"2020-11-21T18:33:56","modified_gmt":"2020-11-22T02:33:56","slug":"immortal-light-bulbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/2020\/11\/21\/immortal-light-bulbs\/","title":{"rendered":"Immortal Light Bulbs"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. Fran is entertaining and informative, I like her videos!<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

“At 800 hours\u2014another routine precaution\u2014a 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. <\/p>\n

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, . . . <\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,16,17],"tags":[2954,2952,2953,2285],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-sergneri","4":"post-4308","6":"format-standard","7":"category-faits-divers","8":"category-sea-stories","9":"category-thinking-about","10":"post_tag-bryron-the-bulb","11":"post_tag-franlab","12":"post_tag-shelby-lightbulb","13":"post_tag-thomas-pynchon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4308"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4314,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4308\/revisions\/4314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}