The Secret Life of Ghosts, Or Whatever Happened to Aunt Gertrude?

Image from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/Mystery.png

You may never have heard of Leslie McFarlane, but odds are good that you've come across at least some of his work, if not the plays, short stories, and articles, then the children's books that have outsold any other title series for boys.

In 1976 (a year before his death) McFarlane  published an autobiographical book, Ghost of the Hardy Boys. The ghost here is the the author himself who depicted the first volumes of the Hardy Boys under the name Franklin W. Dixon. Unlike authors, like George Eliot or Mark Twin,who selected pen names for themselves the writers who churned out popular children's books for the Stratemeyer Syndicate were assigned names, which often carried on to other ghost writers as no author was considered irreplaceable.

The irony of this book is that he devotes many pages protesting that he is far more than the writer who first breathed life into the pair of boy detectives and their formidable Aunt Gertrude only to be forced to both begin and end with the series that he did not own the rights to. The 20 Hardy Boys books he wrote served as his bread-and-butter and kept his family afloat when the Depression hit and other publishers had little or no money for authors.

Work from the Stratemeyer Syndicate served as the artist's equivalent of a day job while he wrote what he considered more serious literary work, which, he did succeed in publishing after a number of false starts. The false starts are as entertaining as they are educational.

McFarlane, who is Canadian by the way, embarks on his writing career by working for newspapers, including J. Jonah Jameson, who discourages his literary ambitions because he views as pulling a potential journalist in the opposite direction needed for a newspaperman. But McFarlane doesn't give up and continues sending out manuscripts to magazines, often, not with any real understanding of what truly fits the publications. But he is not forced to simply learn by trial-and-error, as some editors take the time to give him really valuable feedback and direction.


That is one of the reasons why this book is of particular interest to people who write; it gives quite a bit of insights into the literary world. McFarlane learns to distinguish between what's popular and what's good and how to churn out what's popular for the sake of making money. But here's the rub: though he presents his Hardy Boys work as just for the sake of money, he takes particular pride in his craft, particularly in his infusion of humor and the memorable creation of the boys' Aunt Gertrude.

I put Aunt Gertrude into the title because her treatment in the reworked versions of the books issued in the later part of the 20th Century belie the fact that he does feel connected to his creation, for all his protests that it's all the property of the the syndicate. He is horrified to discover that her dramatic entrance into the series was completely cut in the new editions of the books, as demonstrated to him by a staff writer for a magazine named Bob Stall.

When Stall first approaches McFarlane to talk about the Hardy Boys series, he says he's not interested in discussing that work. After all, he feels he should be recognized for the four novels, 100 novelettes, 200 short stories, 75 television scripts, and 50 films he wrote. But Stall manages to get his attention when he shows him how the books have been eviscerated in the new editions:

They haven't just been streamlined. They've been gutted from beginning to end. Those old books were well written. They had words you could roll around in your mouth and taste. They had funny scenes. They had scenes you could wallow in. These new ones move faster all right, but too fast. There's never a place to stop and linger. That's why the old were so great for a kid. They had flavor. And now the flavor is all gone. 

Stall adds:

The books were written for a literate generation ... But not these new ones. And they'll engender an even less literate generation. 

Remember, this was reported back in 1976.  By today's standards, attention spans were long then; just look at the pacing in movies and television shows of the era compared to today's. Yet, people who remembered the previous generation noticed a difference and saw it as the sign of a trend.  Certainly, kids' books today move at an even faster pace than those that were read in the late 20th Century.

You don't have to be a Hardy Boys fan, and I assure you, I never was, to appreciate McFarlane's reaction or to accompany him on his always entertaining journey to becoming a better writer and laughing with him at his youthful pretensions, which may just remind you of your own.

How many times did Edison fail in attempting to invent the lightbulb?

Thomas Edison holding a replica of his 1880 lightbulb design in 1925

The answer is not around number like 1,000 or 10,000 times that some people like to claim. It took 2,774 attempts to arrive at the bamboo filament that made Edison's lightbulb a commercial success, though he was not the one who invented the electric light.

Electric lights  in England

Various inventors dabbled in channeling electricity for light many decades before Edison did. Credit for the first electric light goes to the British chemist Humphry Davy who invented the Electric Arc lamp in the first decade of the 19th century,  though is more famous for the lamp that bears his name invented in 1815.

Another English chemist, Warren de la Rue offered a design in 1840 that relied on a coiled platinum filament in a vacuum tube. Thought it worked quite well, the high cost of platinum rendered the bulb too expensive for mass production.

In 1850 an English physicist named Joseph Wilson Swan used carbonized paper filaments for his bulb design.  It took yet another decade to make a working prototype, though it was still  not viable as a commercial product. It took him until 1878 to developed a bulb  that relied on treated cotton thread, which both increased longevity and removed the problem of early bulb blackening.

A light across the Atlantic 

In the interim, on the other side of the Atlantic, a patent for the Woodward and Evan’s Light was filed in Canada on July 28, 1874.They used carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filled with nitrogen. While the product worked, Canada is not really recognized as the cradle of electric bulbs. 

That's because even though Woodward obtained an American patent in 1876, he wasn't able to launch his bulbs in the U.S.  In 1879 Thomas Edison bought out the patents from Woodward and his Canadian partners. Then in 1885 Woodward sold a share of his Canadian patent to Edison, as well. But that doesn't mean that Edison merely capitalized on the work of others. 

Edison's own advancement

Edison did make a significant advance in lightbulb design in developing a filament was made from carbonized bamboo, which allowed it to burn for over 1200 hours. It was that design that was put into mass production.

Remember Swan over in England? According to "Who Invented the Light Bulb?"  Edison's own lightbulb design was to close too that of Joseph Swan's to be  awarded its own patent. But in the spirit of "if you can't lick 'em join 'em," Swan and Edison partnered up in 1880 to develop a viable lightbulb. Edison's patent was awarded on January 27, 1880.

 Exactly how many attempts did it take to get the right filament for  Edison lightbulb?

While we there was no actual tabulation of all the steps along the way, there is a very precise number connected to the experiments surrounding the bamboo filament -- 2,774. 

It's cited in a Rutgers newsletter on the Thomas Edison papers here:

No one, including Edison, ever counted the number of experimental lamps that they made. There were hundreds of experiments before he developed the bamboo lamp. And many additional experiments before the lamps were adequate for commercial production. In a letter to Edison in spring 1884, Francis Upton noted that the lamp factory had conducted 2,774 experiments (presumably since it had started operations in October 1881).

The link in the paragraph above take you to a digital image of a handwritten note on the bamboo lamp. 

What about the inspiration of not giving through thousands of failures? 

What to make of the famous quote about Edison claiming not to have failed 10,000 times but to have

Inside Edison's lab. Photo by Ariella Brown

 found 10,000 ways that did not work?

There's no record of that quote with respect to the electric bulb, though he did say something like that about  his experience with the battery. The Rutgers newsletter dug up a quote that comes pretty closed in Edison: His Life and Inventions. an authorized biography by Frank Dyer and T. C. Martin, first published in 1910. Edison's friend and associate, Walter S. Mallory, offers this account:

This [the research] had been going on more than five months, seven days a week, when I was called down to the laboratory to see him [Edison]. I found him at a bench about three feet wide and twelve feet long, on which there were hundreds of little test cells that had been made up by his corps of chemists and experimenters. I then learned that he had thus made over nine thousand experiments in trying to devise this new type of storage battery, but had not produced a single thing that promised to solve the question. In view of this immense amount of thought and labor, my sympathy got the better of my judgment, and I said: 'Isn't it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven't been able to get any results?' Edison turned on me like a flash, and with a smile replied: 'Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won't work!'

There you have it, not exactly in the words you find on quotes sites, but the same idea. The point is that Edison had to go through a great deal of trial-and-error to discover what would make the bulb work well. That required more persistence than flashes of insight, which is why Edison is associated with another quote: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration" Spoken statement c. 1903 that was published in Harper's Monthly in September 1932.

[Note: this blog has been updated multiple times since it was first published with references to events that occurred after 2015. I talk about that in this What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO.]

Shedding some light on Latimer

I'm adding in another note on the development of the lightbulb to clarify some confusion stirred up by Joe Biden's declaration in Kenosha on September 3, 2020, "A black man invented the light bulb. not a white guy named Edison. Okay?"

One thing Biden got right is that a black man named Lewis Howard Latimer did advance light bulb

designs. Latimer was a remarkable inventor, electrical engineer, and patent expert who advanced light bulb design. He did work for Hiram Maxim, as well as Edison.

Lewis Howard Latimer

While  working as a draftsman for Hiram Maxim, founder of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, he along with Joseph Nichols, registered a patent for a light bulb with a carbon filament that burned better than than the bamboo one in 1881. He also got the patent on or ‘the process of manufacturing carbons’ which was an improvement on the method for the production of the carbon filaments in light bulbs.

Latimer only started working for the Edison Electric Light Company in 1884 and remained at that New York City location until 1896; he never worked alongside Edison as a "mucker" in the Menlo Park Lab.  As chief draftsman and patent expert in the legal department of Edison Electric Light Company. Among his duties was conducting patent searches (not so easy in the days when everything was on paper files)  and testifying on Edison’s behalf in court cases surrounding patents. Latimer was also the author of Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System, which was published in 1890.

The researchers for the historical authenticity messed up on this in their attempt to reference Latimer's contribution to the lightbulb  in the seventh episode of  the HBO period drama The Gilded Age. As the events of the first season take place in 1882 -- when Latimer was still working for his competitor -- it would have been impossible for Edison to  invite Latimer to take credit, as the characters joke, at that time.   

In person and virtual option to learn more

Photo by Ariella Brown

If you're interested in learning more about Edison and his experiments, including the invention he did consider a failure (talking dolls),  take the time to visit Edison's lab in Menlo Park, NJ (pictured above).  It's held by the National Park Service. Find information on exhibits, hours, fees, etc., here. 

If you time it right, you can go over to see Edison's home, Glenmont, pictured here on the same day. You can also take a virtual tour.

The Lewis Latimer house is located at 34-41 137th St. Flushing, NY 11354. It is open to the public Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays 11-5. You can enter free for a self-guided tour, though getting a guided one now costs $15 for adults. It's free for children under 12 and caregivers. It's $8 for all other categories. The museum has its own free parking lot for visitors.

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