Dan’s Papers April 1, 2011 danspapers.com Page 30
Edison
Science
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east of the Appalachian Mountains. Over in the Midwest, iron ore was gotten by blasting mountainsides with dynamite to create boulders of 100 pounds or less. The boulders would be taken by truck to big mining plants. There they would be crushed with rollers lying side by side and the resulting gravel then brought to another building to be separated with strainers into iron ore and sand and so forth. This was a highly labor intensive operation. Edison developed a better and an astonishingly elegant way. He wouldn’t tear down a mountain. He would put small cartridges of dynamite into rock and break it into enormous pieces of 20 or 30 tons each. These he would take by steam shovel to 250-foot-tall cranes which would pick them up and drop them into the top of enormous crushing buildings. Instead of the rollers being side by side, they would be one above the other. And they would be nine feet in diameter. The enormous boulders would simply fall into these three massive rollers which would be adjusted like giant jaws with pulleys and leather belts in and out so what came down through to the bottom would be no greater than 14 inches in diameter. The smaller rocks would then fall through medium-size boulders and then down into equally unique drying machines and then further down into a series of 240 magnetic separators similar to the ones he devised with the two compartments in Quogue. Eventually, the iron would be fashioned into briquettes and the sand into sandbags. At the time, iron was selling for $6.50 a ton. With far less labor,
he could sell it for $5.50 a ton and still make a profit. And he was far closer to the mills than those mining operations in the Midwest. His investors backed him completely. The plant was built in a remote area, which Edison named New Village. Edison also designed and built factory-worker housing there with running water and electricity in every home. This was going to be a huge success. But then, after the expense of a whopping $2 million ($200 million in today’s money), terrible news came from a remote area of Minnesota. A new seam of iron had been found there. It could be gotten at easily. And industrialists had now completed a mining operation there. They were offering up iron at $3.50 a ton. And they had lots of it. A pall fell over the Edison Concentrating Mine Works. Everyone knew what it meant. It meant that Edison Consentrated would never open. And it did not. Edison spent weeks trying to figure out a different use for his factory. But nothing he thought of could work out. His investors, who had made millions investing with him in other projects, did not blame him for what was now transpiring—$3.50 a ton was $3.50 a ton, and that was that. And so, on a train back to what was then Edison’s new home in Orange, New Jersey, Edison smiled and said what he did about it all being a great deal of fun spending all this money. And so they moved on.
1857
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But the bottom line is your guess is as good as anybody else’s. As for Jonathan Schooler, the collapse of his earlier study about faces continues to obsess him, even though he is now safely a tenured professor at the University of Washington. Recently, he tried something new and, well, almost, perverse. Maybe Extra Sensory Perception had something to do with this. His subjects were shown 10 cards, each of which had a picture on it. He showed each card to them for just two seconds. So there wasn’t time in some cases to make a determination about what was being looked at. After the test was over, he noted that about five out of 10 cards had been recognized on average. But now there would be a second test. Turning the cards upside down on a table, he randomly selected five of them. Then he added five new cards with pictures on the back that had never been seen before. This time he asked his subject to just point at five cards the subject believed would have pictures on the back. What he was looking for with the second test was really interesting. The second test was random. Or was it? Was it possible that the five cards pointed at in the second test would have a higher probability of being identified by this subject when doing the first test? In other words— was it possible that these identified pictures, burned into the minds of his subjects, could have—by some precognition—been identified (continued on page 32)
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