The Electrical Experience

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Book: Read The Electrical Experience for Free Online
Authors: Frank Moorhouse
Most of the impurities went to the bottom of the barrel within minutes. The water could then be filtered.

One Drink That Did Not ‘Catch On’
    During the twenties George, in partnership with a local poultry farmer, tried to introduce a number of egg drinks. This is one, which together with the others, did not gain public acceptance.
    HOT EGG LEMONADE
    One egg, juice of one lemon, 3 tablespoons of powdered sugar. Beat the egg with the lemon juice and sugar thoroughly. Mix while adding the hot water. Serve with grated nutmeg and cinnamon. The amount of lemon juice and sugar may be varied to taste. Serve hot.

THE END OF ICE

    â€˜We are but the engine-drivers of progress,’ T. George McDowell said, moving a paperweight as if by calculation, as if it were a driving-lever, a switch, a throttle.
    â€˜Is friendship superseded?’
    â€˜Ice and candles, Jim, ice and candles—’ balancing the two words—‘ice-making belongs with candles—and the one-horse shay, and red-flannel underwear.’
    Jim Tutman without spirit said that electric refrigeration in the homes would break down—people would die in their sleep from escaping gas. They would come back to the safety of ice. And, anyhow, many homes would not be able to afford electricity, ever.
    â€˜No, Jim.’
    The unpleasant paradox for T. George was that he felt a love for ice. He had a great personal need for ice. He became unsettled when he was somewhere farther down the coast where ice was not available. He liked an ice-chilled soft drink. God bless the carbonated drink. Not only did he make ’em: he loved ’em. And sometimes on a hot day he would hold an ice-chip in his palm and look deep into the ice, into the slivers of trapped oxygen, and philosophise.
    Staring into the ice, he could not help but believethat there was another silent, possible world inside the ice. He was not talking divinity. He would not recognise a god if he saw one coming down the main street in an automobile. But ice did not destroy. It preserved. Nothing disintegrated, nothing decayed in ice. Therefore it was related to life, not death. There could, for instance, be a civilisation frozen under the North or South Poles. Bodies and cities frozen in ice. He thought maybe one day they would in fact freeze those who died. Awaiting the scientific means of restoring life. Whom to restore? With all due respect to the sanctity of life there were some people he would not wish to restore. He proposed those who had achieved success in their own lifetime.
    James Tutman was a borderline case.
    Jim should have changed over to the household electrical refrigerator business instead of doggedly going on making ice. Jim had made only a half-success of life. He had pioneered the ice business in this town, home delivery, ice-chests. But all that was finished.
    Â 
    It was not that men hate progress, but that they love inertia.
    Â 
    Man’s know-how was his personal capital. The bank inside the head. It was once said that it was wise to invest in know ledge because no man could steal it from you. No longer true.
    It was the closing of the bank doors for Jim. What he had learned in life was no longer valid currency.
    A man was nothing more than what he knew and what he could do. He had no time for people without vocation. Not that Tutman was one of these. He had vocation—was passionately, or had been, devoted to a craft. But Jim’s vocation was disappearing from the face of the earth.
    Jim Tutman, ‘refrigeration engineer’, one-time chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, Rotarian, had once had the Premier of the State stay overnight in his home, had entertained Inventors and Aviators, and was, in fact, an Inventor himself, in small ways. Some in the town swore that Tutman had invented the block of ice. But this, of course, was not the case. Now here was Jim in his office, frowning, uncomfortable, had put on a tie, to seek a sustaining loan from

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