Take mercury for instance. At
most environmental temperatures the stuff is a silvery, shiny, heavy
liquid. Amazingly heavy. Used over the years to stiffen hat brims,
help in gold panning, and in light switches.
Fun to play with if you are a kid.
Stuff splits into individual droplets, that roll around on a surface
seemingly without leaving any trace.
Push two droplets together and they fuse into one; strike one with a little
bit of force, and it splits into dozens.
And as little as a teaspoon in a bottle, and you can feel the impact
energy as you tilt the bottle back and forth.
Great fun.
Problem is, very toxic too. You’ve
heard the term “mad hatter”? Yep, comes
from breathing in too much mercury vapor.
Seen pictures of gold miners with no teeth? That’s cause they used the mercury in their
pans to gather the really fine powdery gold, then rinsed the pans and used them
to eat stew and beans from.
Nasty stuff.
But a great conductor of electricity.
And the fact that it is a liquid, allowed some bright person to devise
an electric switch that could be mounted on the top of a pole, and as the sun
dropped, the vial of mercury would tilt and the tilt would allow the mercury to
flow to one end, to connect two wires together.
These switches were used on the top of every wooden telephone pole
that also mounted a street light. The
mercury switch would automatically turn the light on at dusk, and off when the
sun came up.
And take the telephone pole, once a mainstay of every neighborhood. Used to string telephone wires and power
cable along the street and down to each house.
Made of wood, roughly 40 feet long, 12 inches or so in diameter at the
bottom, and 6 inches in diameter at the top.
Cross arms to hold the wires apart from each other. Glass insulators.
Used to post lost pet fliers, and yard sale signs, and to cast cool
shadows for hot bare feet to rest in on warm summer days.
Mostly extinct now because people wanted to have less “clutter” in
their neighborhoods, and so all those pesky wires have been buried under the
street.
But back in my day, spaced three or four to the block, there was a
wooden light pole on both sides of the street.
And on at least two of those poles, there was mounted a street light,
activated by a mercury switch.
One night, after our father had let us spend some time playing with a
large pool of mercury (which actually explains a lot about our childhood if you
spend some time thinking about it) one of us boys came up with an idea.
If the lights on the poles were controlled by mercury switches, and if
mercury flowed from “un-contacted” to “contacted”, then if we could make the
top of the pole swing back and forth like a tree in the breeze, we might be
able to get the street light to turn off at will.
The challenge had been thrown down.
Now, my memory isn’t good enough to tell you how long it took us to
figure out how to do it, nor how many things we tried before we were
successful, but I can tell you what worked.
We learned that if you used an 8 pound sledge hammer, and whacked the
pole as high up as you could reach, as hard as you could, rhythmically, you
could, over a number of whacks, get the top of the pole to sway back and
forth. Back and forth far enough, fast
enough, to cause the mercury to flow away from the contacts on the switch, shutting
the light off.
And wonder of wonders, once the contact was broken, and the light
winked out, it turned out that the light had to cool back down before the power
could make it work again; a period of a good 10 – 15 minutes depending on the
temperature on a particular night.
I am certain that the neighbors jumped up and rushed to their windows
that first night, hearing the rhythmic thump, thump, thump of sledge hammer on
pole. But on peering out their curtains,
and seeing the wild Vandermolen brothers clustered around a telephone pole,
hammers in hand, whacking away gleefully, they either decided it wasn’t a
problem, or wasn’t safe enough to venture out.
And so went back to their reading, TV watching, or other tasks.
Filled with our new knowledge, we told our friends about how you could
shut off a street lamp. Mostly we were
met with “un uhs” and “bet you can’t’s”.
And of course, our pride on the line, we would gather a small group and
show off our technique.
I can’t tell you who came up with the idea, but it was bound to happen
sooner or later. And after one thing led
to another, I recall one night a large gathering of boys from around town, each
with their father’s prized sledgehammer in hand.
We set out to black out an entire section of town.
Knowing that once we exited the immediate neighborhood, populated
exclusively by retired folks who preferred watching the “Vandermolen Comedy
Channel” to most any other recreational activity, we were likely going to have
to contend with a hostile population. So,
we spent some time gathered on the front porch, discussing targets and
strategy.
Padding quietly across town and into our targeted area, each boy was
stationed leaning up against a telephone pole with a street light. We had enough boys in the group to target
every light pole on a single block, on three successive streets. Last boy in place was to be the one who
started the process rolling.
There followed about 15 minutes of frantic pole pounding until your
light went out, then running down the street past the other guys banging on
poles, until you reached a pole that wasn’t being assaulted, and hammer in hand
get back to work. At one point, after my
second or third light winked out, I stood looking back down the block and three
full city blocks without any street lights, while behind me I heard a
disjointed cacophony of thumps ringing against poles on the street I was on,
and on one street either direction.
All told we blacked out 12 city blocks before we heard sirens in the
near distance and sprinted through a side yard to the field along the railroad
tracks, and thus, around the approaching police and back home.
That thud, thump, thump, thud coming from all directions in the dark
of night is a visceral memory that still springs full to mind now and again;
and with each recollection, the joy of wailing on a light pole with a sledge
hammer, blacking out the night returns anew.
Copyright © 2013 Marty Vandermolen
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