Menlo Park, New Jersey. A charred wick begins to burn in the hollow of Thomas Alva Edison’s light bulb. It produces a light that, this time after thousands of attempts, would not soon go out. It will last 13 and a half hours before going out. A record. Long enough for the Old Man to realize that, with the necessary improvements, it could last as long as he wanted. It’s Edison’s Eureka moment. The invention makes the headlines of major newspapers. Edison, however, is shunned or ridiculed by several English and French newspapers, as a dodgy person with no solid scientific background. Edison, in his American ignorance (as the English and French newspapers called it), once disdainfully points to an entry in a science book that declares platinum infusible except to the heat of a blowtorch. “Give it to me here, I’ll melt it for you, in that gas burner! Now look: do you see all these little bubbles along the magnified wire? That’s where the platinum melted!”
