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Technology and Culture 47.3 (2006) 566-569



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Persistence of Memory

It seems that events are larger than the moment in which they occur and cannot be entirely contained in it. Certainly they overflow into the future through the memory that we retain of them, but they demand a place also in the time that precedes them. One may say that we do not then see them as they are to be, but in memory are they not modified too?
—Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, book 5, La prisonnière

The accompanying photograph was one of five that appeared with an article titled "Electricity Enshrined" in the 16 February 1929 issue of Electrical World. The piece was part manifesto and part want ad, a general declaration of Henry Ford's collecting ambitions and educational ideas aimed squarely at readers burdened with obsolete electrical gear. It included a list of corporate donors and concluded with a statement, credited to Ford, emphasizing the cultural significance of central stations, electrical utilities, and visionary thinkers. And so the word went out. Henry Ford was preserving the "romance and history of electrical development"; contact J. W. Bishop, care of Henry Ford, Dearborn.

Bishop is the gentleman in the photograph. He and Ford had been firm friends in the 1890s, when both worked for Detroit's Edison Illuminating Company. Their subsequent careers had diverged spectacularly (Bishop stayed on with the lighting company and its successor, Detroit Edison, rising to the position of superintendent of substations), but they had remained in touch. In 1927, Ford, looking for someone to collect historic electrical artifacts, contacted his former boss at Edison, Alex Dow, to request the services of his onetime coworker.

Bishop was the ideal man for such a task. His lifelong career in the electrical industry, beginning at age fifteen in 1890, gave him the necessary [End Page 566] familiarity with the evolution of electrical equipment. His affability and eagerness, evident in this image, are also manifest in the voluminous correspondence he kept up with donors. Using the nationwide network of dealerships that Ford cannily employed as a conduit for artifacts traveling to his museum in Dearborn, Bishop and Ford assembled one of the largest and most significant collections of electrical apparatus in the world.

In the picture Bishop is standing next to a selection of recently acquired artifacts tiered on an improvised display. He might almost be about to sell us something—leaning slightly into the camera, holding the viewer with a steady and penetrating gaze, his expression suggesting the faintest beginning of a smile. And of course he was selling something to the progress-minded engineers who read Electrical World: the idea that these bits of electrical detritus were in fact historic relics that belonged in a museum. The items date mostly from the 1880s: meters, indicators, an arc-light regulator, fuses, cutout blocks. All had briefly been state-of-the-art, and all had been fast-tracked into obsolescence by the revolution whose momentum they had helped to spur. It is a fascinating selection. Delicate assemblages of brass lurking in shadow boxes contrast with wooden fuse blocks that could almost have been whittled on a porch. In the bottom row are examples of Edison's electrolytic meter, an apparatus that allowed utility companies to determine a consumer's electrical usage by the change in weight of zinc plates immersed in jars of zinc sulfate solution.

These are essentially laboratory objects, some crude and some elaborate, bolstered and repackaged for transplant into businesses, basements, and generating stations. Their form and finish reveal the vocabulary and sensibilities of their designers and manufacturers: etching a pattern into the brass components of a meter or varnishing a wooden case was second nature to them, and a kind of persistence of vision ensured that the new devices would often resemble already common ones, such as steam- or brake-pressure gauges. Many are graceful, but with a whiff of impetuousness, as if only a hasty ransacking of craft, scientific, and mechanical engineering forms had satisfied the nascent electrical industry's needs, or as...

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