Technology

by Sheila Connolly

 

My great-great-grandfather, Silas Barton, was one of the founders of the General Electric Company.  At least indirectly:  he was responsible for rescuing the floundering Thomson-Houston Electric Company, persuading them to move to Lynn, Massachusetts and getting them the contract to electrify a new building being erected there by the Grand Army of the Republic, of which he was a member. He went to work for Thomson-Houston, and even managed their Chicago office for a couple of years. I still have a pair of light bulbs they made before 1900. In 1893, Thomson-Houston merged with Thomas Edison’s New Jersey-based company and General Electric was born (they still have a plant in Lynn).  Silas worked for GE the Boston office for a few years. He didn’t follow them when they moved to Schenectady, New York, but his brother Daniel did, and worked for them for the rest of his life.

 

By interesting coincidence, Thomson-Houston won the contract to introduce electricity to the town where I now live, at the time that Silas was working for them. So there’s a direct (family) line from the 1890s to the current that’s flowing through my laptop as I type now.

Those of us of a “certain age” share memories of a lot of evolving technologies.  When I first used a telephone (you know, those clunky black things with a rotary dial), there was a live operator, and you had to give her the phone number you wanted.  Now I have an iPhone.

When I was in high school my computer science class (the first offered by the school—we had to borrow computer time from a local college, and the computer was larger than my refrigerator and lived in a chilled room), we toured the local New Jersey Bell Labs offices, which we were told was cutting edge at the time.  Now my aforementioned cell-phone does most of what we witnessed there.

My father was the custodian of the family’s cabinet-model “record player,” a piece of furniture encased in mahogany, with storage for some records as well as a radio built in.  My sister and I were not allowed to touch it.  He and my mother were partial to Broadway musicals, and I can still sing along with most of them, because they used it regularly.  Now (you guessed it) my cell-phone can handle the same music instantly, with better sound quality.

And now there are digital books. I come from a family of readers.  We lived in a series of rented houses, mainly built in the 1920s, and most of them had “libraries” with a lot of built-in bookcases, so storage was never a problem. Now I can download books onto my (yes) iPhone or iPad or Nook—more books than any of those houses could have held.

We had an Encyclopedia Britannica for homework.  Now we have Google.

And we handle all of this in our overtaxed brains.  Yes, I can still remember my grandmother’s phone number from the 1950s.

Funny—if there are any links among all of these technological advances, it is that the delivery systems have consistently become smaller and faster.  Does that mean we are a mobile and impatient society?

 

By the way, my ebook Relatively Dead (May 2013) includes descriptions based on the house where Silas Barton lived in Waltham, as well as the cemetery where he is buried.

 

 

POLITICS IN 1684

By Sheila Connolly


No, this is not about the current contentious battles, local, state and nationwide.  I thought it might be fun to see what elections looked like in 1684.

As I've probably said ad nauseam, I do a lot of genealogy.  One of my earliest ancestors, John Floyd, my eighth-great-grandfather, born around 1636, was living in Lynn (then Romney Marsh), Massachusetts as early as 1662, and since there was a limited pool of able-bodied men back then, he served in various public offices over the years. Since Massachusetts was very scrupulous about keeping records, I can trace his political career.

Actually he's one of my favorite ancestors, not because he was brilliant and successful, but because he got into trouble a lot.  He was a lieutenant in King Philip's War (and may well have trodden the earth upon which I now dwell) and his men mutinied—twice.  In 1692 he was arrested as a witch (but not convicted). He died in Lynn in 1701 and is buried there.

So I'm always looking for interesting details about his life, and that's how I stumbled upon the Boston Town Records of 1683-84, which report,

At a publique meetinge of the inhabitants of Bostone upon lawfull warning for the election of officers of the towne for the yeare ensueinge were chosen for:

[Now, here's the fun part.  Old Captain John was elected as Surveyor of Rumny Marsh, but that was pretty tame.  However, among the other offices filled were:]

Clarkes of ye Market (four men, including Isack Goose and Benjamin Breame)

Sealers of Leather & to inspect the cuttings & Gashings of Hydes

Water Bayliffes

Packers of Fish & Flesh

Measurer of Salt

Scauengers (Scavengers)

Hogg Reeues (Reeves)

Cryers

Also, "Voted, That the Custome of practice taken vp by ye Towne at the chooseinge of Jurors, not to choose any to that service yt were present at the Meetinge, be hence forth made Voyde, & that it be free to choose as well of those present as out of such as are absent."

If I'm reading this right, up until March 1684, if you weren't at the meeting you could be called as a juror.  Maybe they weren't finding enough people for a jury, if they had to include the elected officials as well. (In April of that year it was noted "That for a more orderlie choice of Jurors for the time to come there should be a committee chosen to take a list of such pesons in all ptes of the Town, as are able & discreete men fit for that service…for amore orderlie choice then formerly that ye Courts may be the better supplied with able & suffitient men, & the burden of yt seuice not lie vpon a few." 

For all of that, there are also officers whose title we (at least in Massachusetts) would recognize today:  Moderator, Selectmen, Constable.  The group voted on road repairs and surveying of town boundaries.

I won't guess how many of the above positions were officially eliminated or which still linger on the books of various municipalities, but I haven't seen a hog reeve lately (nor any wandering hogs).  But if you live in Massachusetts, there a comforting sense of continuity: attend your town meeting and you're participating in a tradition over three centuries old. I guess we'll survive another year's worth of elections.