Warehouses, Efficiency, and the Relentless War on Waste
I have received the strangest rumor — a dispatch, they tell me, from the year 2026. I do not vouch for its authenticity, but I will say this: the principles it describes are as old as my first dynamo station on Pearl Street, and I recognize every instinct behind them.
They speak of a great mercantile concern called Ta…
A Man After My Own Filament
I have received the strangest rumor — a dispatch, they tell me, from the year 2026 — concerning a fellow in London who has spent twenty-seven years testing lighting prototypes inside his own home. Twenty-seven years! Now, I have logged more hours in my laboratory than most men spend sleeping in a lifetime, and I confes…
On the Madness of Spending Fortunes Before the Meter Runs
I have received, by means I cannot explain and do not trust, a peculiar dispatch claiming to describe the state of electrical — no, they call it 'computational' — enterprise in the year 2026. I shall treat it as I treat every rumor that crosses my desk at Menlo Park: with suspicion first, and calculation second.
The r…
A Single Bottleneck for the Whole World's Machinery? I Have Seen This Before.
I have read this curious dispatch, purportedly from the year 2026, and I confess it has given me a night of poor sleep and furious thinking. Not because I doubt its plausibility — no, quite the opposite. I recognize the pattern. It is my pattern.
They speak of something called a 'semiconductor,' a tiny wafer upon whic…
A New Showman Builds His Empire — And I Know the Type
I have received the strangest rumor — a dispatch, they tell me, from the year 2026. Ordinarily I would toss such nonsense into the waste bin alongside the letters from perpetual-motion cranks. But the substance of it interests me, because it describes a man doing precisely what I understand: turning spectacle into indu…
On the Folly of Valuing Castles Built on Leased Air
I have received a most peculiar dispatch, purporting to come from the year 2026, and I confess it has given me a rare moment of pause between experiments. Let me set down my thoughts plainly, as a man who has spent more hours in the laboratory than in the counting house, though I know the counting house well enough.
T…
A Rumor of Strange Machinery in California
A dispatch has reached my desk — passed through three hands before landing here at Menlo Park — and I confess it has given me a moment's pause, which is not something I grant easily to rumor or speculation. A man named Jobs, operating somewhere out West, has apparently built a studio of some kind — pictures that move, …
Stone and Grief: A Builder's Suspicion
A curious rumor has reached my desk here at Menlo Park — something passed hand to hand like a contraband pamphlet, purporting to describe the work of one Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect I know by reputation as a man of considerable ornamental ambition, building fortress-houses out in Los Angeles some decades hence. Th…