Thomas Edison Ate My Balls

The history of the light bulb is a story of intrigue, espionage and a steamy love triangle gone bad. Unfortunately, that story has been optioned by ABC for a miniseries this fall, so we're going to have to stick to the afterschool special version.

Thomas "Cotton Gin" Edison was a rootin', tootin' six-gun-shootin' eccentric from the crusty butt-crack enclave of Battle Mountain, Nevada. Some may remember the town as the site of Evel Knievel's ill-fated final stunt, when he attempted to jump over the moon in 1983. The crater remains a popular tourist attraction and the center of Battle Mountain social life to this day.

The Battle Mountain of Edison's day was a quieter berg, nestled into Nevada's scenic dirt basin and known to cartographers nationwide as the flattest place in all of the United States. Early settlers exercised a healthy sense of irony in naming a town so flat that twelve people are killed every year by tumbleweeds hauling ass through town.

Little did they know that Battle Mountain would eventually live up to the "battle" part of it's name, when the construction of two dueling gas stations across the street from each other on Mountain Pass Road would mark the beginning of the constant bottle rocket wars across the road that have continued to this day. These skirmishes gave birth to the popular Battle Mountain Eye Patch fashion statement, worn by most adult residents of the town, all of whom had been blinded by bottle rockets. Few visitors to the town last more than a day unless they infer from the shrapnel-strewn storefronts that it might be best to gas up after dark.

But contrary to popular belief, the gas stations weren't the only two buildings in Battle Mountain in Edison's day. The town also featured three houses, a tool shed and a doghouse. The houses belonged to the Edisons, the Turnbuckles, and the Edisons' other neighbors who nobody ever bothered to talk to. The doghouse belonged to the town dog, Ruffles McGinty. Thomas Alvin Edison was born into this bustling metropolis in 1851, and soon made a name for himself as the only kid in town.

Throughout his childhood, Edison was mercilessly teased by the townfolk for his childlike size and pathetic vertical leap. The townsfolk consisted of Mr. Turnbuckle, who ran the Western Gas Station, and the father of the other neighbor family, who ran the Eastern Gas Station. Most of their attention was devoted to the bottle rocket war, but the one thing they could see bandaged eye to eye-patched-eye on was teasing Thomas Edison about his vertical leap.

The alienation and bitter obsessions fostered in Edison's childhood were to serve him well later in life, as he grew into a fine inventor. That's what his mom told him anyway, most of the rest of the town just made fun of him for inventing things that had already been invented, like the derby hat and the shovel.

At the age of eighteen, Edison swallowed his fears and made the move to the big city: nearby Battle Lake, Nevada, a dusty, arid stretch of scraggly, sun-baked land with the population of a little-league baseball team. There he would finally be able to pursue his scientific interests free of the closed-minded milieu and stifling mental environment of small-town Battle Mountain.

Edison blossomed in Battle Lake, spending his days yelling at clouds, digging holes in random parts of town and inventing in his spare time, taking credit for the invention of the marshmallow, the frying pan and nighttime.

As a sister invention to go along with nighttime, Edison decided to invent the light bulb, so he could practice his vertical leap when it was dark. Early attempts at catching lightning bugs in a jar proved effective, but short-lived. After two years of effort, Edison refined his light bulb to consist of an electrical current running through a fishbowl, but found it difficult to develop a filament that could sustain the current for more than a few seconds.

Edison tried anything and everything in his search for a perfect filament, including copper, gold, goldfish, grass, paper, mud, sand, string, underwear, hot dogs, a horned toad, Popsicle sticks, his finger and a neighborhood kid's big toe. After months of experiments, Edison discovered that bamboo coated in carbon worked the best, and he had one last laugh at the neighborhood kids who had told him you couldn't smoke bamboo. His new filament was groundbreaking, and the Edison light bulb burned for a remarkable four minutes before catching the wall socket on fire.

What few people today know, however, is that some English guys had already invented the light bulb fifty years earlier; the innovation just hadn't made it to Battle Mountain yet. After a brief stint as a local hero, Edison tried to take his invention to the patent office in Reno. He was promptly laughed the hell out of town, pantsed and ridiculed for his modest vertical leap.

We might never have known the name Edison today if it weren't for the fact that he snapped, went back to Reno and went hillbilly on the whole town with a rubber hose until it was declared that Edison really was the inventor of the light bulb, never mind all of those bullshit light bulbs everybody over in Europe had been using for years.

Thereafter the name Edison became synonymous with light bulbs and insane backwoods crackers everywhere, a true story of American ingenuity and intimidation that would stand as an example for years to come.

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