The Story Behind The Edison Enigma by Thomas White

 

 

 

The Story Behind The Edison Enigma

By Thomas White

I was watching TV one day and there was a commercial for an electric car. I remembered doing a corporate event for Saturn where we did a big reveal of an electric car several years earlier. I wondered what the heck happened to that car? I started poking around and found several articles that were entitled, The Death of the Electric Car. That got me curious about the history and I researched it rather thoroughly. I found out that at the turn of the 20th century the electric car was the most popular car on the road, quiet, clean and efficient. The one problem was the power source and through the first decade of the 20th century they were hard to come by. The first electric car that drove 100mph was in 1899, if you can believe that. There were often races that would see the electric car travel hundreds of miles on a single charge. In 1911 William J Bailey invented the solar powered battery and there was the power source. So what happened to the electric car?

   My research brought up some very interesting coincidences. Between 1895 and 1910 several historic events happened; the advent of the electric car and the internal combustion engine, Thomas Edison invents the electric light and John D. Rockefeller is the richest man in the world because he owns Standard Oil. Standard Oil's primary product was kerosene. But, with the invention of the electric light, the entire kerosene market was about to collapse. In 1900 there were about 5% of homes that had electricity. In 1910 almost 80% of homes had electricity. Along this time another milestone occurred, the discovery of the Texas oil fields. 

   My imagination began to run wild. I am not a big conspiracy guy but all of these factors were pointing in one direction, someone decided to support the internal combustion engine over the electric car. The world’s largest corporation is about to lose its main product. The byproduct of kerosene is gasoline, which they used to throw away. And the invention of the internal combustion engine which is powered by gasoline. Odd things were happening all around the country. On Staten Island they held an Electric car race promising to hit 100MPH. The car hit a trolley track and flew into the crowd killing two people. They outlawed electric car racing. As thought it would not have happened had it been a gas-powered vehicle.  I never found any congressional accounts of this becoming a topic on the senate floor but it seemed a short stretch that it could have. 

   At that point I began to wonder how that could have been done? How could someone direct people’s attention to an inferior product. I realized that it is done all the time and I will use the VHS vs Beta tape as my example. Then, I started to formulate a story that included the possibility that electric and solar power were the original power sources for the planet and that somehow that had gone array. One thing led to another and a story was formed. What if solar and electrical power had been the original destiny for the world but someone went back in time and changed it? I had my plot line, now I just needed to put a story together. The result, The Edison Enigma.

 

 

Edison, a Chicago physicist, manages to successfully transport an object through time. Almost immediately following this success Dr. Edison is shut out of the facility and told by benefactor Raphael Barrington, to take a vacation. He is contacted by Don Rivendell, a grizzled old man with a secret. Rivendell explains to Tom that he is not the first person to discover time travel. Someone else went back and changed history by saving a young girl from dying in an internal combustion engine explosion.

Dr. Edison is tasked with going back and fixing history. He travels back to 1904 to find the younger version of Rivendell and stop him from saving the girl. 

You can purchase your copy of The Edison Enigma at Amazon at https://t.ly/_NOoo.

 

 

Thomas White began his career as an actor. Several years later he found himself as an Artistic Director for a theatre in Los Angeles and the winner of several Drama-Logue and Critics awards for directing. As Tom’s career grew, he directed and co-produced the world tour of “The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Coming Out Of Their Shells”. The show toured for over two years, was translated into seven different languages and seen by close to a million children. Tom served as President and Creative Director for Maiden Lane Entertainment for 24 years and worked on many large-scale corporate event productions that included Harley Davidson, Microsoft, Medtronic Diabetes, and dozens of others. The Edison Enigma is Tom’s third novel following up Justice Rules which was nominated as a finalist in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association 2010 Literary contest, and The Siren’s Scream.

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