130 Years, 21 Oct 2009

[gar]

090929-2110 EST

On Wednesday 21 Oct 2009 an evening celebration of the 80th anniversary of the dedication of The Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village, and Edison Institute will occur. Now called the Henry Ford. This opening date was the 50th anniversary of Edison's first successful carbon filament lamp experiment. This lamp lasted about 40 hours when Edison stop the experiment about 1 or 2 PM on Tuesday 21 October 1879. Edison was confident that this length of run time meant that the major problems had been solved and he wanted to get a close look at the filament. Many bulbs had failed in a short time before this one.

The problems of the dynamo and distribution system had been solved earlier in the year.

On 21 October 1929 Tom Edison and Francis Jehl re-enacted the building of this first bulb with Henry Ford and President Herbert Hoover looking on in the restored Menlo Park Laboratory in Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan.

There are Ford Motor Co. movies of the 1929 events and these are now at the National Archives. My belief is that the original film was 35 MM and is fairly grainy on the video copy. Another film segment on the same video tape, but from 1937 is less grainy. However, not quite as good as a copy I made from a 16 MM film that was made from the original 1937 film.

A photograph of a replica of the Edison carbon filament lamp made for the 100th anniversary at Greenfield Village by General Electric is P13 (1372A) at my website
http://beta-a2.com/EE-photos.html


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[480sparky]

The YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARqyM9nvWuw

 

[peter d]

I was just at The Henry Ford and Greenfield Village a few weeks ago. Did the Rouge Plant tour as well. I highly recommend a visit a to these wonderful preservations of American engineering and cultural history.

 

[ohmhead]

Well Gar good post i was born in Edison New Jersey as a kid i went to Edisons lab in Menlo Park New Jersey when we were kids you could pay 50 cents to visit the lab and go in and see the lamp burning very dim .


This was back in 1962 funny i aways looked up to Edison since our town was named after him then i found out that in 1800 a english inventor named Humphey Davy invented the first . Not to say Edison wasnt a great inventor but many before him had a hand in that first light did you know Tesla worked for Edison in his lab i wonder how many patents of the one thousand Edison has was Teslas?

Were schooled to see our american inventors in history but if you go to the us patent office files its all about money and who can make what we see even today . Thats why Bill Gates has 200 patent infringement cases pending to date .

What id like to see today is someone come out with a invention that will change us today like in the past but what ?

 

[gar]

091014-1608 EST

The Menlo Park complex in Greenfield Village can be seen from above at
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=42.30....305436,-83.225802&spn=0.001698,0.002446&z=18
This seems to be from Farm Service Agency, and is set at the 100 ft range.
This is the GPS location of the Fort Myers Lab. The Sarah Jordan boarding house is just to left. Further left is the Menlo Park complex. The lab building is on the left side of this image but not off of the image and midpoint vertically.

If you place the cursor at a location, right click, then pick "what is here" the GPS coordinates for that point are displayed.

42.305646, -83.226902 is the machine shop and power house, lengthwise SW. This is slightly above the middle, and partly off the image.
I do not know if these were the original orientations. But this direction provides good sunlight into the machine shop in the morning.
42.305313, -83.226698 is the main lab building, lengthwise SE.
42.305035, -83.225319 is the Sarah Jordan boarding house.
42.304884, -83.225025 is the Fort Myers Lab.
Elevation is about 600 ft in Greenfield Village.

Much of the development on the first Ford monoblock V8 engine, in the period before 1932 when it was introduced, was done in secret in the Fort Myers building. Prior to this no one had built a monoblock V8. Emil Zorelein developed the ignition system here and made use of a steam engine in this building as a dynamometer load for engine testing. There were some late nights when the engineers slept in the adjacent Jordan boarding house.

http://www.wrenscottage.com/gvm/invention/fortmyers.php
http://www.wrenscottage.com/gvm/invention/dynamo_menlo.php
http://www.wrenscottage.com/gvm/invention/exres_menlo.php

Have you tried street view in Google? A number of locations in my area have been photographed. However, some of the pictures are more than two years old. For example Michigan Stadium shows none of the new construction that has been going on for two years.

Internal to Greenfield Village there are no Street View images. There is a view along Village Road between the Ford Test Track and the Village. A very small portion of the Edison Lab is visible if you know where to look.

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[gar]

091014-1714 EST

The following view is of Henry Ford's Fairlane Estate just north of the village. When Mr. Ford was alive there was a dam in the Rouge River that drove a generator for the Estate. The night of his death the river was severely flooded and the generator was non functional. I believe the generator was flooded, and the only light in the house was candle light. I have never seen the river higher than it was that night. About 2.5 miles west, at the Gulley Road bridge over the Rouge, I observed the water within 2 ft of the bridge road surface.

I believe the dam was at the constriction in the river to the south of the house.

My GPS reading from Google on the Estate is
42.314076, -83.232508 .
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sou...989,-83.231993&spn=0.001698,0.002446&t=h&z=18

This is almost precisely north of the north east corner of the Henry Ford Museum by about 3000 ft.

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