SINCE ITS ESTABLISHMENT IN 1982, THE CHEMICAL Heritage Foundation (CHF) has been a focus for efforts in both industry and academia to preserve “the treasures of the chemical and molecular community.” In June CHF inaugurated its new, permanent home in Philadelphia. The complex includes the Donald F. and Mildred Topp Othmer Library of Chemical History as well as the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, both named for couples long prominent in chemical research and history. The foundation has also published Arnold O. Beckman: One Hundred Years of Excellence , a book with an attached CD-ROM “video portrait” of Beckman talking about his life and work. Further information about CHF is available at www. chemheritage.org .

Currently on view at CHF’s new building is “Dow Chemical Portrayed,” an exhibit of paintings made in 1920 by the British artist Arthur Henry Knighton-Hammond. Industrial themes were common in early-twentieth-century art, but while such photographers and painters as Margaret Bourke-White and Charles Sheeler emphasized the massive size and austere geometric beauty of factories, Knighton-Hammond’s soft-edged portrayals have the flavor of dreamy landscapes, sun-drenched Mediterranean villages, or busy shipyards, even with titles like Partial View of Caustic Plant Interior . The Dow exhibit will remain until the end of 2001, and a catalogue reproducing Knighton-Hammond’s paintings, along with others that have industrial themes, is available from CHF. Also on view are selections from the Fisher Collection, which consists of Flemish, Dutch, and German artworks from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries depicting alchemists at work. Readers planning to see either exhibit should call the curator, Marjorie Gapp, at 215-925-2222, ext. 229, for schedule information.

Edison’s Dimmer Bulb

THE THOMAS A. EDISON PAPERS PROJECT, BASED AT Rutgers University, is an ongoing effort to compile, catalogue, and publish a “select edition” of the vast amount of records left by America’s greatest inventor. Four printed volumes and more than 200 reels of microfilm have been published to date, and a large selection of Edison documents is also available online at http://edison.rutgers.edu . These range from basic biographical information and photographs from his early life to arcana that will attract only the most dedicated scholars (a searchable database includes among its categories “Insurance Policies,” “Payroll and Time Records,” and “Mortgages” as well as the more inviting “Test Reports,” “Speeches and Addresses,” and “Circulars and Brochures”).

Especially noteworthy is a downloadable collection of all 1,093 of Edison’s patents. His pioneering work in telegraphy, electric lighting, the phonograph, motion pictures, and many other areas is all here, of course. But for nonspecialists, the most interesting Edison patents may be the ones that were not commercial successes. An 1891 patent for a “phonograph doll,” for example, prefigured the interactive talking toys that are so annoyingly familiar to anyone with children today. The doll contained a specially modified phonograph that could be activated with a crank to play a wax recording of a nursery rhyme. Edison set aside an entire building for the manufacture of the dolls, which stood two feet tall, but their mechanisms proved too delicate for the rough-and-tumble of shipping and nursery play, and they wore out even faster than little girls could grow tired of them.

Another patent that anticipated a much later technology was “Improvement in Vocal Engines” (1878), a precursor of today’s mechanisms that can be activated with a voice command or handclap. Edison’s device used a diaphragm to “transform … sound-waves into continuous rotation of a shaft, to act as a prime motor for various light mechanisms,” such as “clocks and other small apparatus requiring minute power.” The market for this rather modest laborsaving device was evidently not great enough to sustain commercial production.

A patent that demonstrates Edison’s talent for connecting disparate fields of invention is his 1881 “Preserving Fruit.” When he was perfecting his incandescent light, in the late 1870s, one of his biggest obstacles was creating a vacuum high enough to keep the filament from burning. In 1879 he greatly improved his results by switching to a Sprengel pump, which uses a stream of mercury droplets to draw air from a chamber. It occurred to Edison that the same apparatus might be used to create a vacuum over uncooked food and preserve it for long periods. His patent involved placing “fruit, vegetables, or other organic substances” in a glass bulb, evacuating it, and then sealing the bulb with a blowtorch.

Except for the extremely high vacuum, there was nothing new about Edison’s idea for preserving food by excluding air. Similar methods had been patented as early as 1810. One 1836 scheme envisioned including a small bag of iron nails in a sealed tin of food; the nails were supposed to rust and thus consume any oxygen that might be present. Unfortunately, no method relying solely on evacuation, including Edison’s, has ever worked, because a vacuum alone will not kill the microorganisms that cause food to decay.

Two other crowded fields that Edison made unsuccessful attempts to enter were typewriters and aviation. An 1872 patent for a “Type Writing-Machine” is among his most farsighted, describing an electric typewriter at a time when manual ones were just starting to be used. It is impressively thought out, with a forest of gears and pulleys and shafts, a daisy-wheel-type device to impress the letters on the page, and even a bell to signal the end of a line. Edison, an old telegrapher, expected the main job of his machine would be to print telegraphic messages “instead of writing out the same, as now usual.” For most users, though, manual typewriters proved to be fast enough without the added complications of electricity. The electric typewriter would not be widely used in America until after World War II.

As for aviation, a 1910 patent shows a simple helicopter in which rotary blades are used to lift a platform containing passengers or cargo. He intended the blades to provide lift only, mentioning in passing that “means for propulsion, such as propellers, and likewise, steering apparatus, etc., … may be carried.” The design made no provision for countering the blades’ motion with a second rotor, a key consideration in successful helicopter design.

Finally, in 1919 the aging Edison patented a “Method and Means for Improving the Rendition of Musical Compositions.” “Ordinarily during the orchestral performance of a musical composition,” the patent explained, “no effective pitch guide is furnished the players with the result that the renditions by the several players of the stringed instruments in the orchestra usually vary more or less in pitch, thereby producing beats or pulsations and rendering such performance disagreeable and unpleasant to listen to.” These were strong words from a man who had spent years of his life listening to lo-fi recordings on scratchy wax cylinders, but Edison’s near-deafness may have had something to do with it (“I haven’t heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old,” he once wrote in his diary), or perhaps he had been listening to Schoenberg.

Whatever the cause, Edison devised a system in which one musician, designated the “master artist,” would play the piece and create a standard pitch for the others to match. Each member of the string section would have a telephonic receiver in one ear through which the master artist’s playing would be transmitted, allowing him to “notice if he is out of pitch with the master artist” and make the proper adjustments. Here again Edison was ahead of his time, for while there is no record of orchestras strewing their stages with telephone wires, systems like that proposed by Edison (except wireless, of course) are sometimes used today in compositions that mix live performance with prerecorded tracks.