FIRST ONE
More-and-more, it seems, no one can be said to have been “first” to make, do, say or think anything.
We often credit the wrong people with inventing the handy, convenient gadgetry we use so extensively today .It seems so unfair and there is an entire breed of do-gooders who are manning the barricades to do battle with anyone who champions anyone other than their favorite.
I know better but I still find myself thinking that Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb. Most people I know say Edison did it, but contending arguments from encyclopedia sources, patent office records, and chronic debunker's in the media crevices, contend that he only “improved” upon existing patents for making more usable light bulbs. Several fence-sitter,[peace-making accounts say it was a “simultaneous” invention – that Thomas Alva Edison, in America, and Joseph Wilson Swann, in England had, by some odd happenstance, both invented the light bulb at the same time in 1879, based on the discovery – perhaps from in the year 1811when Humphrey Day found that filaments empowered with electricity in a vacuum enclosure emitted light. The English Judicial Courts went along with that view when Edison started marketing a 16-watt bulb in 1879. He was forced to give half of his British operation to Swann and to market his bulbs as Swann-Edison products for years. One account I have read judges Edison to have been the inventor of the light bulb because he made one which was “practical” whereas the others provided light for a limited span of hours rather than days and nights, weeks and months.
Another “first” I have run into as I grow older is that which contends that Hannibal, from down Carthage way, when he decided to do Rome in took a herd of elephants across the Alps through Rome back door.
He did and he didn't, I find. It was not all that usual to use elephants in battle in area where the beast would be more-or-less at home but to try move any number of them through the snow packed may well have been a “first”.
The magazine illustrators and history buffs have had a field day showing the ponderous elephatanks bashing their way through snowbanks up to their tusks.
There are elephants and there are elephants and not all of them are Jumbos. Hannibal took along, it is thought, perhaps twenty small-breed North African elephants which measured, perhaps, seven feet bottom-to-top or vice versa ,which put them under even a modest Alpine snowdrift.. They did not take to the climate at all, and it is said he may have found his way to the River Po and more acceptable weather with, perhaps, half of the elephants he started with in Spain. He had cloth coverings made for them in the Alpine stay which was not a quick, over night trip. It is hard to say which appeared more pitiable ...the worn out elephants, debilitated and weary or the band of north African desert men in Hannibal's command. Either one, or both, in appearance, probably , at first sight, scared the togas off quite a few Roman citizens. I have never found any mention of Hannibal having ferried the left-over elephants back to Carthage when his Roman holiday had run its historical course.
I have wondered if bone-hunters today turn up some elephant pieces along Hannibal's trails from Spain into the edge of France, the Alpine heights and down the boot of old Italy, and wonder how they got there. Who, I wonder, to, who was first to do so? If not, there you chance to make the record books – digging up used elephant carcasses in the Alps. Be the first to do so.
A.L.M. September 25, 2004 [c629wds]
