One way of teaching engineering ethics that is less grim
than picking through wreckages of failed projects is to portray moral exemplars: engineers who did the right thing in a critical
situation and benefited people thereby. For
example, William LeMessurier, a structural consulting engineer, played a prominent
role in determining that the 60-story Boston skyscraper formerly known as the
John Hancock Tower was unstable in certain types of wind loading. The analysis he and his colleagues produced
convinced the owners to install millions of dollars' worth of cross-bracing,
and the building is still standing today.
For many generations both in the U. S. and abroad, Thomas
Edison was a heroic inventor whose ideas benefited millions. In 1940, at the height of the inventor-as-hero
period in U. S. history, MGM brought out a pair of panegyrics based on his life:
"Young Tom Edison" starring Mickey Rooney, and "Edison the Man"
with Spencer Tracy. I must confess that seeing
the the former film on TV played a disproportionately large role in my decision
to become an electrical engineer, around the age of eight.
However, cinematic heroes today tend to be mainly of the
comic-book variety, so when "The Current War: Director's Cut" was finally released after
a two-year delay connected with the fall of Harvey Weinstein, whose production
company financed the film, I could hardly wait to see what a present-day
director and actors would do with the raw material.
And some of it is pretty raw. There was no hint in the MGM flicks that
Edison was ever anything less than selfless as he enthusiastically searched for
innovations that would be boons for humanity.
In particular, there was nothing about the admittedly sordid tricks he
pulled to make George Westinghouse's rival AC system look like a threat to
public safety, up to and including killing horses and pigs (but not an
elephant, as was falsely attributed to him by some confused reports of an
elephant's electrocution he filmed at Coney Island in 1903). But in "The Current War," Benedict
Cumberbatch's Edison is no one's idea of a moral exemplar, though he would
qualify as perhaps an object of pity.
Just the kind of historic rabbit-trail I took you on about
the elephant is one of the problems with the film. Despite the director's thoughtful inclusion
of little side-titles when new characters are introduced (I particularly liked
"Nikola Tesla, futurist"), the people I saw the film with all
complained that it was very hard to follow.
Although I have made somewhat of an amateur study of Edison,
Westinghouse, and that era of the history of technology, I myself had trouble
figuring out who was who unless the side-titles were there to help. In particular, there was an older bewhiskered
gent who seemed to be Westinghouse's technical Svengali, but who was only
addressed as "Frank." At the
time I guessed it was Frank Sprague, who played a prominent role in early
electric tramways. But later in the film
it turned out he was Franklin Pope, an "electrician" (which was what
electrical specialists sometimes called themselves back then) who died, not
trying to get Westinghouse's electric fan motor to work as the film implied,
but in trying to fix a motor-generator installed in the home of his own
basement.
As most historical films have to do, this one takes dramatic
license with the facts, but stays reasonably close to the main narrative, which
is the battle between Edison's first-to-the-market but ultimately unsuccessful
DC system, and Westinghouse's cheaper and better alternative of AC, which is
still with us today. The climax of the
MGM Spencer Tracy flick, which was Edison's invention of the light bulb, is
relegated to a long speech by Cumberbatch at the 1893 World's Columbian
Exposition in Chicago. Westinghouse won
the bid to light up the fair, and that triumph symbolized the end of the
current war. Westinghouse and Edison run
into each other at the Japanese exhibit, and Westinghouse asks Edison what it felt
like to invent the light bulb. What
ensues is perhaps the best piece of classical acting I've seen Cumberbatch
do—no special effects, no superhero action, just a man painting a picture of a
scene with words that answers the question better than any number of
adjectives.
Cumberbatch seems to be making a career of portraying
emotionally peculiar geniuses: first as
the legendary Sherlock Holmes, then as the eccentric mathematician and code
expert Alan Turing, and now as Edison.
Critics of the film say he does a good job of portraying our era's idea
of the corporate genius: the
Steve-Jobs-type disrupter of the status quo who nevertheless betrays his usually-suppressed
emotional life by playing back the voice of his dead wife on his new invention,
the phonograph. Edison's first wife Mary
did die in the midst of the current war, which only added to his distress and
frustration. But he didn't let her death
slow him down in pursuing his goals by whatever means he thought necessary,
including secretly cooperating with a man who thought electrocution would be
better than hanging condemned criminals.
I suppose I should have put a spoiler alert on that last
paragraph. But it's unlikely that too
many people will see the movie just for the suspense. To techno-nerds such as myself, who are
familiar with many of Edison's lesser-known inventions, the film was a feast of
seeing cinematic reproductions of things like the first kinetograph projector
(an early form of motion-picture machine) and his electric pen for writing on
paper for mimeograph reproduction. And
the film gets some humor out of the Edison family's alleged habit of secretly
communicating with each other via Morse-code taps.
But for the average viewer who has little or no prior
knowledge of the era, I'm afraid the film will be a rather confused mish-mosh
of mysterious devices, obscure motives, and hard-to-identify characters. A strength
of the film is that everything takes place against a lovingly-reproduced CGI
background of 1890s America, including a panoramic view of the Columbian Exposition,
complete with the original Ferris wheel, that ought to be issued as a two-by-three-foot
poster on its own. I'm not sure what
effect the movie will have on eight-year-olds, but don't look for there to be a
flurry of young people flocking to be electrical engineers in about ten
years. Actors, maybe, but not engineers.
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