No Money in Pictures!

A Grandmother’s Tale:  There’s No Money in Pictures! (Thomas Edison)

 Have you ever had a wise person in your life? I did. For a while. My maternal grandmother, Irene, taught me a lot. Part of those teachings was an appreciation of history and the historical people she’d known.

Irene’s father, Tom Blackley, was an intelligent young man who, in 1893, got a job that would challenge that intelligence. His new boss was a man named Tom Edison of the Detroit Edison Company, and one of his co-workers was Henry Ford, a young machinist.

Blackley’s job was to invent things. One of his challenges was to find how many ways he could use the bi-metal strip – an elementary thermostat. One of the first things he did was kick chickens off their nests. An incubator would be more efficient to hatch eggs. Many evenings when the plant was quiet, he and Ford would join Edison over a glass of whiskey in the back room to discuss the day’s challenges. One can only imagine the energy of those discussions.

Above is a photo of Tom Blackley with Henry Ford and other workers at the Detroit Edison Company. When I asked why Edison wasn’t in it, my grandmother said he’d been asked to come out and get his picture taken with the others but wouldn’t waste his time. His response? “There’s no money in pictures!” Apparently, even great inventors can be dead-assed wrong – and that statement pretty much identified his focus.

One of Irene’s jobs was to deliver her father’s lunch to his workplace, and I try to wrap my head around what it would’ve been like to have known these people as men and not the icons they later became.

She told me of the difficulties they encountered lighting the streets of Detroit. Since insulators were unknown, it was dangerous work, and many men died of accidental electrocution. She described the terrible burns workers experienced if they touched the wrong wire at the wrong time.

As one of the people involved in solving those problems, Tom Blackley was front and centre, but eventually he’d had enough. It was time to retire to Canada, get a homestead out west, and enjoy a farm.

When Tom crossed the border into Canada, his papers identified him as an ‘Electrician’ which was a brand-new designation. He eventually acquired a homestead south-east of Edmonton, Alberta, where he and Rosa, along with Irene, settled down to farm.

One day a couple of men showed up on Tom’s new doorstep. The communities of Strathcona and Edmonton had a problem. The wires they’d strung across the High Level Bridge to unite the two communities kept shorting out, so only Strathcona had lighting. Someone heard that Tom had worked for Thomas Edison, and he knew all about electricity.

He agreed to help, and it wasn’t long before both sides of the North Saskatchewan River glowed in the night. The era of night-time reading was born in Edmonton.

Irene had inherited the intelligence and curiosity of her father, but women weren’t encouraged to read and learn in those days. Pushed into marriage at a young age, she was soon into the back-breaking job of raising six children. Determined to educate herself, she read everything she could get her hands on. Current affairs and religion were interests, and she developed a profound knowledge of the bible. At the time, there weren’t many books, and it was a long wagon ride to the nearest library.

Today our intellectual shopping isn’t limited to a local newspaper and the town pastor’s perception of the scriptures. We have all the world’s most precious books at our fingertips. Not so for Irene.

My grandmother and I were on the same wavelength, and I sometimes had the passing thought that if reincarnation was a thing, she might, of all her grandchildren, choose me as her mother. I didn’t think much about it until years later when I noticed something odd.

Here's the mystery:  Irene passed on years before I had the first of two daughters. I didn’t realize until long after she was born that the name, Renée, is short for ‘Irene’ and that it means ‘re-born’.

Today my daughter, Renée Robyn of https://www.reneerobyn.com/ is one of the top digital photographers in the world. She creates fabulous photographic images and travels the world inspiring thousands to follow their dreams. There is indeed, Mr. Edison, “money in pictures”.

I sometimes wonder . . . If my grandmother decided to come back for another run at life, would she have selected freedom and travel this time around? Would she have taken advantage of a more enlightened time and followed her dreams?

And in my quieter moments, I ponder that name thing. It’s quite a coincidence – if you believe in coincidences, that is.

 Deborah Kane