Medium light: revisiting Edisonian modernity

LISA GITELMAN AND THERESA M. COLLINS

Medium light: revisiting Edisonianmodernity

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all thingsas a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that,in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.

– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)1

Whatever its varied and curious afterlives, McLuhan’s famous dictumthat the medium is the message had one airtight example from the first:electric light. As McLuhan put it, ‘The electric light is pure information.It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spellout some verbal ad or name’ (p. 8). The electric light becomes hisquintessential case. Finding a medium that has no obvious messageworks to demonstrate that the medium is itself already message. ‘Pureinformation’ has presence, not meaning, and that’s what it means.Despite McLuhan’s compressed and often cryptic style, his exampledid identify the ‘blindness’ or ‘failure’ of contemporary discourse thathe hoped to mitigate: we readily acknowledge the communicativefunctions of lights when they spell out things like ‘Open’, or ‘FreshFish’, and we know to stop the car when the traffic signals indicate, butin other cases we’re so busy attending to what is lit that we fail to noticethe very light that directs and enables – ‘shapes and controls’ (p. 9) –our attention to whatever is illuminated. McLuhan’s project hasinformed media studies ever since, as students and scholars try tounderstand the ways that media forms work to construct and delimit –shape and control – the things they are used to communicate.

In singling out the electric light rather than considering illuminationgenerally, McLuhan gains his contrastive case, electrical signage, at therisk of fudging history. Isn’t it possible – even likely – that people inearlier times were just as blind to the communicative functions ofgaslight and candlelight as we are today to electric? Or was McLuhansimply sidestepping the past as he naturalised the present? Gaslightand candlelight are now so outmoded that they do get noticed today,communicating messages beyond the things that they illuminate.Familiarity with modern electric lighting – ubiquitous to the point ofinvisibility – has helped to make gaslight quaint at the same time that ithas helped make candlelight romantic. Either way, McLuhan’s eye was

on his own 1960s, drenched in a historically and culturally specificelectronic glare. What he misses in this instance, and what mediastudies has come lately to consider, is the salience of new media andold. When media are either new or obsolete they cannot evade ournotice but rather seem emphatically to call attention to themselvesaccording to the multiple, dynamic conditions of their apprehensionand use.

In one sense McLuhan’s identification of the electric light as amedium would not have seemed as provocative in the 1880s as it did inthe 1960s. As Carolyn Marvin notes, when electric light was new, thenotion that it had communicative functions ‘would have been aperfectly sensible claim in both Britain and the United States’.2 Far frombeing a medium without a message, electric light became the object of‘high-drama’ public spectacle, communicating not only a sense ofpotential – of the electrical dream world to come and profits galore –but also a ‘community ideology’, redolent with assumptions aboutnormative social relations and vested interests: about the coincidenceof electrical and social power (pp. 158–9). Giddy accounts of electricalexhibitions and municipal installations quickly seemed formulaic –even paradoxically so – since ‘the best effects were always those thathad ‘‘never before been created’’ and were guaranteed to ‘‘astonish’’’observers (p. 165). Beginning with the earliest electrical installations,like Thomas Edison’s illumination of Menlo Park on New Year’s Eve1879/80, these exhibitions came to share a ‘vocabulary of effects’, saysMarvin, ‘that defined the public spectacle’ (p. 162) and were in turndefined by the additional media of their popular apprehension,the press.

In a more particular sense, however, McLuhan’s identification of theelectric light as a medium can be difficult to map backward to the1880s, at least insofar as that term – medium – did not mean then what itwould later on. Throughout the nineteenth century a medium was ‘anintervening agency or substance’.3 So, for instance, United Statespatents that used the plural form, media, in the nineteenth century do sowith greatest frequency in reference to ‘filtering media’, substanceswhich work to filter solutions from more to less cloudy. Beyondfiltering, a quick tally of additional uses reveals grinding media, as forlenses; gaseous media, liquid media; fermentation media, nutrientmedia; conducting media for heat or for electricity, also insulatingmedia, absorbent media; mechanical media as in ‘the media of gear-wheels’, clamping and fastening media, rotating media, flexible orelastic media, actuating media such as a hydraulic lift; as well asperforated media, transparent media, resisting and obstructing media.4

Where nineteenth-century usage shaves closest to McLuhan’s ken, one

2 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2

occasionally encounters image-receiving or sensitised media forphotographic purposes, the scene-carrying media of a panorama, oradvertising media that consist of printed cards. Only in these last few,late-century cases do media and medium begin to depart from their ‘oldgeneral sense’, as Raymond Williams puts it, and head towardsomething like the formal – Williams calls it ‘technical’ – sense inwhich McLuhan invoked specific forms of communication, and headbeyond that to the yet more ‘specialized capitalist sense’, which is socommon today in invocations of the Media as such.5

Historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch thus cuts pretty close to contextwhen he writes of the 1880s, ‘Edison’s incandescent electric light is, infact, nothing but a methodical imitation of gaslight in a new medium.’6

Where once there was gas piped between supplier and lighting fixture,now there could be wires conducting electrical current between thetwo. Not only does this phrasing capture medium as an interveningagency, a middling matter, but it also nods toward one of the keyframes of reference that made electrification at once intelligible andnew: Edison filled the pages of his notebooks with cost calculations tobe sure his system would undercut the price of gas, while the capitalmarkets saw the value of gas shares plummet with pronouncements ofthe inventor’s imminent success with electric light. Edison’s publiclyavowed focus on illumination rather than, for instance, powerdistribution was a strategic gesture aimed to promote persuasivecontrasts and comparisons with gas: the new incandescent illuminationwas the killer application of its day.7

We are not, it is hoped, making a narrow etymological point butrather a broader, historical one for which usage provides a readymarker. When Edison’s first permanent central station went intooperation in lower Manhattan in 1882, the New York Herald carried anenthusiastic account. (The Herald building stood across the street fromthe illuminated district and was already lit by its own isolated Edisonplant.)

Messengers came speeding in to say all was ready, and then thecomplicated apparatus was set going, and in a twinkling the areabounded by Spruce, Wall, Nassau, and Pearl streets . . . was in glow . . .[Within] the lighted areas were big buildings like the Drexel and littlestores tucked away in dark corners, but the communication nowhere failed. . . Altogether the experiment in district lighting was pronounced asuccess.

Here without the word media is something of the conceptual field itthen helped organise.8 Messages arrive orally at the central station andthen electricity is communicated throughout the district. Communication

Medium light: revisiting Edisonian modernity 3

depends upon contiguity, contact, an unbroken circuit, and thismaterial connectivity or flow is at once intermediate, systemic, andimagined able to fail. Darkness – ‘tucked away in dark corners’ –attends the scene as both provocation and risk, reconstructed andeffectively denatured as the negative index of artificial illumination.

How was the nineteenth-century medium of electricity transformedinto the electric light as a medium? That is, what was the pathwaywhich led from media as mere intervening substances or agencies tothe more familiar, twentieth-century version of media as a collection –even a progress or parade – of discrete yet comparable technologicalforms: the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, and so on? How,in short, did media become their own subjects? Already in the 1880s theground was laid, judging from semi-technical, semi-popular journalslike The Electrician (1878), The Electrical Review (1882), and The ElectricalWorld (1883), which associated different electrical technologies whilestill distinguishing them. The Electrical World, for instance (no joke: ‘Aweekly review of current progress’), included subsections headed ‘TheTelegraph’, ‘The Telephone’, and ‘The Electric Light’ in its back pages,columns filled with paragraph-length items for insiders, each of whichoffer an anecdote or report an installation of note, a new contract orcompany, for instance, or some other specific development in the field.

While we cannot hope to exhaust the subject here, we want topropose that electrification played an early and important role in thedefinition of media in today’s formal or technical sense. Instead of anintervening substance or agency, media came to denote the variedtechnical forms of communication, forms which are nominally saidto contain the information – the ‘content’ – that they communicate.Electrification was the ground against which this new sense ofmediation emerged, along with a newly global economy and thesecond industrial revolution. We’d like to label these the processes ofEdisonian modernity, though doing so admittedly follows closely thework of Edison lieutenants like Edward H. Johnson and William J.Hammer, two who undertook so many of the initial, far-flunginstallations of the Edison system. Both were consummate showmen,even if they had very different personalities and talents. (Johnson wasmore impresario, Hammer more engineer.) In London the Daily Newsquipped, ‘There is but one Edison and Johnson is his prophet.’9

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Hammer made and installed what he called the‘First Automatic Motor Driven Flashing Electric Sign in the world’(prototype, fig. 1); the clockwork circuit flashed out E-D-I-S-O-N atop theEdison Pavilion at the health exposition of 1883.10

Before all the Edison hype, electrification projects tended to beinstallations of arc lighting, a technology which relied upon the


brilliant illumination produced by current as it arcs between twocarbon conductors. Arc lights were particularly well adapted tolarge open spaces, like streets and promenades, or large openstructures, like train stations and department stores. The BrooklynBridge – new in 1883 – was a prominent example. When the lower-power incandescent lights developed by Edison and his competitors

Fig. 1


effectively ‘subdivided’ electric light, as they said, public demonstra-tions followed a similar pattern.

The earliest spaces of electrical illumination thus served what WalterBenjamin called ‘transitory purposes’.11 Modern, urban subjectsentered and exited lighted scenes, actors in a shared drama that publicdiscourse painted rapturously as spectacle. Lighting at a distancecaptured the imagination of observers, but the qualities of ambientlight were equally remarked.12 An account of the 1884 arc lightinstallation on the Mall in Washington, DC, was typical, describing theeffect both up close and at a distance and noting where it was brightenough to read easily.13 Electric displays worked as distant scenery andas immersive experiences. The contrast implies a certain flanerie – thecasual mobility of anonymous subjects in and out, through and aroundthe spaces of a modern city – at the same time that it required a toggleof perspective, seeing light and seeing with it. But the spaces of earlyelectrical illumination were ‘transitory’ in another way as well. Withfew exceptions the most celebrated electrification projects of the 1880swere temporary. Edison’s initial illumination at Menlo Park was a briefpublicity stunt aimed partly to impress investors, but his earlysuccesses at the Paris electrical exhibition (1881) and – courtesy ofJohnson, Hammer, et al. – London’s Holborn Viaduct (1882), were alsorelatively short-lived. Exhibition and demonstration were the watch-words of the day, as the promoters of different systems vied to provethe inevitability of more permanent installations and correspondinginfrastructures.

Framing this second transitory quality of early electrical illuminationwas a teleology of domestication, as the example of gaslight hinted atthe future that temporary displays now helped observers to imagine aselectric. When Harper’s Weekly reported Edison’s progress in New Yorkduring 1882, its story was entitled ‘The Electric Light in Houses’, eventhough the details rendered had almost wholly to do with the businessof lighting streets and businesses in lower Manhattan. Edison wascontemplating a second district at Madison Square, where houses witha combined total of 41,000 gas jets waited to be wired, but mention wastoo brief to explain the headline as anything but a shared logic, a tacitfuturology.14 Similarly, when The Electrical World described thespectacular Christmas display put up initially in 1882 at the home ofEdward Johnson, it focused on the tree, which rotated as its lightsblinked. In subsequent years the World added an account of Johnson’s‘entire home’, while hoping ‘to be able to record in the near future thatothers have fitted up their homes with the same pleasant light whichmany of them enjoy at their business offices’.15 As far as incandescentlighting was concerned, industrial installations still outpaced all others


in the United States, most of them isolated plants in individualfactories, while in Europe hotel, restaurant, and institutional installa-tions were more numerous.16

Hammer, too, helped promote the futurology of house electrifica-tion. He threw ‘an electrical New Year’s dinner’ at his home inNewark, NJ, which was covered in the New York and Newarkpapers.17 According to Hammer, coffee, eggs, and toast were preparedelectrically while guests were serenaded throughout the evening withelectric bells, phonographs, and musical instruments. The house hadelectrically activated gas lights, electric burglar and fire alarms, plentyof shocking practical jokes, an electric thermostat, exterior lighting, andan electrically activated cannon as well as fireworks for the stroke ofmidnight. This domesticity-as-circuitry, or what might be called thetotal theatre of time, had been on Hammer’s mind since at least hiswork in Europe, judging from a sketch he made at the end ofNovember 1882 (fig. 2).18

Here a giant clock face and battery appear in series with – clockwise– a skull, bell, phonograph, music box, drum, and glow lights (Geisslertubes with an induction coil). If the skull looks a little incongruous, agothic note amid the discrete components of an electrically activatedcacophony, accounts indicate that the later New Year’s Eve dinnerincluded a luminous skeleton with glowing eyes, as well as a smallbronze model of the Statue of Liberty holding a lighted torch, apresiding figure of Jupiter who ‘spoke’ by phonograph, plusHammer’s younger sister festooned with lights and gotten up as theGoddess of Electricity. The domestic circuitry thus contained a wholecast of allegorical characters, and death was there haunting the clock.

For her part, the Statue of Liberty was there as a topical gesture, partof Hammer’s current repertory, since a later sketch (fig. 3) indicates hefitted out a model Liberty with an electric torch and coin-operated,battery powered circuitry in order to help raise money for the statue’spedestal (then a popular cause). The financial power of a silver quarterearned its donor a demonstration of electrical power.19

Though the real statue’s torch was later rigged with gaslight insteadof electric, Hammer’s fundraising was apparently successful. His coin-operated model suggests a child’s mechanical bank turned electric,while it also gestures toward the first generation of vending machines,which worked to standardise and depersonalise local transactions andthus gestured – however modestly – toward the marketplace as ashared abstraction.20

Of course there were more direct connections between finance andcurrent ascendant. In New York City, Edison investors William H.Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan were among the first to have their homes


Fig. 2


illuminated, and in short order more than 500 other wealthy homes hadtheir own incandescent lighting: dynamos clanked away in basementsand in private gardens.21 The real push in early house electrification,though, was not in homes but rather according to the pre-industrialnomenclature whereby the networks of global capital are mystified:banking houses, brokerage houses, and other houses of commerce.Edison’s Pearl Street district was a strategic zone in the neighbourhoodof high finance: J. P. Morgan’s mansion may have been uptown onMadison Avenue, but the inimitable house of Drexel, Morgan anchored

Fig. 3


the first urban power grid. The Pearl Street district was also the centreof nineteenth-century publishing, and printing houses seized on thenew technology. The Herald and the Times were both illuminated inSeptember 1882, while further experience would show that printinghouses not only needed light more than other establishments – becauseof the necessity of ‘night work’ – but also needed more light.22

Related nomenclatures pointed toward the domestication of publicsand of public space as different kinds of ‘parlours’ and ‘houses’multiplied the sites for electrification. Edison and his competitors viedto provide electricity to the houses of Parliament and the houses ofCongress. Despite an earlier exhibition of Englishman Joseph Swan’sincandescent system, the House of Commons got an Edison plant in1883, even as Edison was derided in the London press as a Yankeeadventurer.23 (One detects the lingering effects of Edward Johnson’sbombast.) Meanwhile theatres and opera houses were consistentlyearly adopters. One of the earliest projects pursued by Edison’slieutenants in Europe was La Scala in Milan, while the first theatreilluminated with incandescent lights in the US was Boston’s BijouTheatre. The Bijou opened with a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’sIolanthe in December 1882, and the next summer advertised itself as‘the coolest theater in the city’ because electricity didn’t heat the housethe way that gas jets always had. But the Bijou also exemplifies thehybridity that characterised the period: when it opened it hadincandescent lights in the lobby, house, and around the proscenium,yet it also kept a steady contract for gaslights and illuminated theadjacent cafe by arc light, while it had an open account on its books for‘calcium lights’, presumably used as stage effects.24 Like the outdoorspectacles introducing electric lights to an eager public, theatre lightingrelied upon a shifting perspective, as audiences saw light and sawwith it.25

If the well publicised illumination of houses of every sort –residential, banking, printing, legislative, and theatrical – helped toreinforce a broad logic of domestication that may have helped to makethe incipient infrastructure of electrical power distribution moreknowable, there were other forms of electrical illumination thatpointed toward a different logic. Just as William Hammer dressed hissister in lights, there was widespread fascination with wearablelighting and personal illumination. Part of the appeal was novelty.The Electrical World addressed ‘dudish electricians’, when it reportedthat in Nuremberg, Germany, it was possible to buy ‘a breastpincontaining an Edison glow-light, fed by a small vest pocket battery’.26

Dancers appeared on stage, girls outfitted with diadems of Trouvelights or ‘electric jewels’ (with wearable batteries) at first, followed later


by designs and effects such as those invented by Loie Fuller in the1890s.27 Beyond novelty, observers enthused at more practical applica-tions, like miners’ lamps, portable outfits for military and other uses, aswell as surgical lights that could illuminate the cavities of the humanbody. Never perhaps had the body seemed so dark, so subject to light:when H. G. Wells’s invisible man took off his artificial nose in 1897, allthat was left on his face was a terrifying ‘dark cavity’.28

Though in some respects in tension, the logics of house illuminationon the one hand and bodily lighting on the other both helped toconfirm the double articulation of electricity. They hint, that is, atelectric lighting experienced doubly as system and component, aslooking with and looking at.29 If it is this double articulation whichseems to offer a typological resource for the modern meaning of mediain the technical or formal sense – system/component mapping tomedium/content – then the varieties of electrical illumination suggestan early, incipient phase of what Raymond Williams called mobileprivatisation. Mobile privatisation is that broad social pattern ofmodernity characterised at once ‘by two apparently paradoxical yetdeeply connected tendencies’: ‘on the one hand mobility, on the otherhand the more apparently self-sufficient family home’. People movedmore and more in the course of their lives and days, while the ‘home-centered way of living’ drew confirmation from the acceleratedrhythms of mass consumption.

Broadcasting was a twentieth-century locus of these duellingtendencies between mobility and domestication, according to Williams,a site where ‘the contradictory pressures of this phase of industrialcapitalist society’ were at some level resolved.30 But there were earlierartefacts at least as telling. Williams himself saw intimations of mobileprivatisation in naturalism, in the new drama of the 1880s and 1890s,where ‘the center of dramatic interest was now for the first time thefamily home, but men and women stared from its windows, or waitedanxiously for messages, to learn about forces ‘‘out there,’’ which woulddetermine the conditions of their lives’ (p. 21). Electrification clearlyoffered another arena where similar tensions played out, evident if onefollows themes of Edisonian modernity that marked the introduction ofincandescent lighting in the early 1880s.31

Notes

1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1964), 7. Further references to this work will be indicated bypage numbers in the text below. The authors wish to acknowledge the


generous assistance of Louis Carlat of the Thomas A. Edison Papers,Rutgers University.

2 Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About ElectricCommunication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1988), 158. Further references to this work will be indicated by pagenumbers in the text below.

3 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (rev. edn,New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 203.

4 These and the following examples take advantage of Google’s PatentSearch (beta), available at http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en; ac-cessed November 2008.

5 Williams, Keywords, 204.6 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in

the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1988), 57.

7 Charles Bazerman, The Languages of Edison’s Light (Cambridge MA: MITPress, 1999); see ‘A Place in the Market’, 141–56.

8 New York Herald, 5 September 1882, included with annotation in ElectrifyingNew York and Abroad, ed. Paul Israel et al., The Papers of Thomas A. Edison,vol. 6 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 644–9; emphasisadded. Helpful to this discussion of media has been John Guillory’s ‘TheGenesis of the Media Concept’, which he generously shared in manuscript.

9 8 April 1882; quoted in Payson Jones, A Power History of the ConsolidatedEdison System, 1878–1900 (New York: Consolidated Edison, 1940), 312.

10 ‘Biographical Data of William Joseph Hammer – 1926’; 14 pp., EdisonPapers and Related Information, Library and Archives (Edison Institute),Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan. Thisimage and the two that follow are part of the Thomas A. Edison PapersDigital Edition (elsewhere TAED) and appear here by permission. Thisdrawing is 03/00/1880 Hammer, William Joseph – Technical Notes andDrawings; [X098E] Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC – NationalMuseum of American History Archives Center: William J. HammerCollection – Notes and Drawings (TAED: X098E01). See http://edison.rutgers.edu for a description of and access to the edition.

11 Benjamin writes of an earlier age: ‘Iron is avoided in home construction butused in arcades, exhibition halls, train stations – buildings that servetransitory purposes’ (‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’,in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its TechnologicalReproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings,Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin; trans. Edmund Jephcott, RodneyLivingstone, Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2008), 96–115 (p. 97).

12 Chris Otter’s recent work The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light andVision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) isparticularly helpful on both counts, as well as on the temporary andhybrid nature of illumination well into the twentieth century.


http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en

http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en

http://edison.rutgers.edu

http://edison.rutgers.edu

13 Electrical World, 12 April 1884.14 Harper’s Weekly, 24 June 1882.15 ‘A Christmas Tree Lighted by Electricity’, Electrical World, 20 January 1883;

see also Electrical World, 3 January 1885, 6.16 See The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, vol. 6, 833–7; ‘Appendix 2: Isolated

Lighting Plant Installations, May 1883’.17 New York World, 3 January 1885, and Newark Daily Advertiser and Journal, 3

January 1885; Hammer recollected the dinner as having occurred in 1885and reported in January 1886. ‘Biographical Data of William JosephHammer – 1926’, 14 pp., Edison Papers and Related Information, Libraryand Archives (Edison Institute), Henry Ford Museum & GreenfieldVillage, Dearborn, Michigan.

18 The drawing is 11/26/1882 Hammer, William Joseph – Technical Notesand Drawings; [X098E] Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC –National Museum of American History Archives Center: William J.Hammer Collection – Notes and Drawings (TAED: X098E17).

19 This drawing is [1881–1889] Hammer, William Joseph – Technical Notesand Drawings; [X098E] Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC –National Museum of American History Archives Center: William J.Hammer Collection – Notes and Drawings (TAED: X098E13).

20 Automatic vending started with gum machines, apparently, and by 1890there were so many automatic vendors in metropolitan areas across the USthat the Scientific American magazine called it a ‘craze’, while theCommissioner of Patents called it a ‘flood’ (Scientific American, 14 February1891; Current Literature, September 1889). For a related argument aboutnickel-in-the-slot phonographs see Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New:Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006),44–55.

21 Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1065. See The Papers ofThomas A. Edison, vol. 6, 67, for Vanderbilt, whose plant was relativelyshort-lived because of Mrs Vanderbilt’s objections.

22 See Alfred Ritter von Urbanitzky, Electricity in the Service of Man: A Popularand Practical Treatise on the Applications of Electricity in Modern Life, trans R.Wormell (London: Cassell & Co., 1886), 523.

23 Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 19 May 1883.24 Boston Bijou Theatre Company; Records; Harvard Theatre Collection,

Houghton Library, Harvard University; call number MS Thr 432.25 See Schivelbusch’s chapter ‘The Stage’, in Disenchanted Night, 191–221, for

context on theatrical lighting.26 Electrical World, 19 January 1884.27 Urbanitzky, Electricity in the Service of Man, 540. See also Graeme Gooday,

Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 105–9.

28 The Invisible Man: Best Science Fiction Stories of H. G. Wells (New York: DoverPublications, 1966), 25. Jonathan Picker’s in-progress ‘Electric Affinities’


suggests this connection, confirmed of course by Ralph Ellison’s rereading,the light bulbs and stolen power of the prologue in Invisible Man. Theauthors are grateful to Picker for sharing his work in manuscript.

29 ‘Double articulation’ is from the sociology of Roger Silverstone, EricHirsch, and David Morely, ‘Information and Communication Technologiesand the Moral Economy of the Household’, in Consuming Technologies:Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, ed. Roger Silverstone and EricHirsch (London: Routledge, 1992), 14–28, (p. 25).

30 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974; HanoverNH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press,1992), 20. Marvin intimates something of the same thing when sheconnects early electrification to the modern television special (p. 162).

31 Williams, Television, 21.


Medium light: revisiting Edisonian modernity

Documents