| Wisdom from the founder of
commercial electricity
Thomas Edison underscored that sunshine was as
practical as electricity. We only have to engineer our tools to make it
so. A key aspect of solar is to use it where it is generated. JPods,
solar powered mobility networks, integrate the distributed nature of
transportation networks with the distributed power delivered locally be
the sun.
1910, Source: Interview in Elbert Hubbard's Little
Journeys to the Homes of the Great:
"Some day some fellow will invent a way of
concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old,
absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I'll do the trick myself if some one
else doesn't get at it. Why, that is all there is about my work in
electricity--you know, I never claimed to have invented
electricity--that is a campaign lie--nail it!"
"Sunshine is spread out thin and so is
electricity. Perhaps they are the same, but we will take that up later.
Now the trick was, you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as
you needed it. The old-fashioned way inaugurated by Jove, of letting it
off in a clap of thunder, is dangerous, disconcerting and wasteful. It
doesn't fetch up anywhere. My task was to subdivide the current and use
it in a great number of little lights, and to do this I had to store
it. And we haven't really found out how to store it yet and let it off
real easy-like and cheap. Why, we have just begun to commence to get
ready to find out about electricity. This scheme of combustion to get
power makes me sick to think of--it is so wasteful. It is just the old,
foolish Prometheus idea, and the father of Prometheus was a baboon."
"When we learn how to store electricity, we will
cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You
see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power.
Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are
manifestations of energy."
"Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal,
as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters,
not as if we owned the property.
"There must surely come a time when heat and power
will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered
by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it
can not be destroyed.
"Now, I am not sure but that my new
storage-battery is the thing. I'd tell you about that, but I don't want
to bore you..."
(Little Journeys to the Home's of the
Great) |
