Whaa!?

I bought a new bedside lamp. A miraculous creature. I need only tap it, anywhere, and it lights up. Oh the effort it takes effort to twist a button or flip a switch in the middle of the night! Who wants more of that? Yes I am that comfort-driven animal. Now, I can just tap the brush-chrome surface anywhere and wahoo, light.

If I am right to think that we are comfort-seeking creatures, and that pretty much everything in our manufactured universe is designed to make us more comfortable, how is it that life does not feel better the easier it gets? We have cellphones to avoid boredom, we have food delivered to our door, we sit in cushy chairs, we experience the weather on TV, we lie in soft beds and temperature control our houses. And at 3am I stretch my hand out of the duvet and... Let There Be Light.

Sometimes a short journey into pre-industrial imaginings helps me see our modern day miracles. Come with me will you. Say you and I are patrons of Leonardo Da Vinci. He has just moved from Florence to Milan and we consider him to be the smartest man alive. He tells us ‘saper vedere’ that sight is the highest sense and the only one to be trusted, and with great excitement you invite him to your place. After dinner you show him this one-touch-lamp. (got my solar charger to juice it up). He wants to know how it works and you tell him it is driven by this invisible river called electricity. That there are other ways to to activate it with the many different properties of the human body, like temperature, radio waves and resistance, but in this case it is it’s capacitance that is doing the trick.

He says ‘Whaa!?’

And you explain that it uses the capacity of a human body to hold electrons and the lamp also has electrons, and when you touch it, when they connect, the lamp senses a circuit trying to charge it with more electrons and detects a difference and shines. Or not.

He says, ‘Whaa?!’

Curious pilgrims from the city states of Milan and Florence camp outside your bedroom door. The Vatican sends emissaries. All bow down to the One-Touch Lamp. She is alive. When you touch Her, She responds. With one touch She banishes the darkness. With one touch She allows the night to return.

A renegade priest calls out, “I bow to the light, I shelter in the dark. I touch Her and She answers me. She brightens my night and rescues me from my 3am demons. Come my people. Let us pray!”

OK, so I am getting a little carried away but does anyone really know how a phone works? Or a touch screen? How anything for that matter in our modern world works? I can describe a process and feel vaguely satisfied as if I finally passed the high school physics test, but does that make radio waves any less mystical?

Last words before I touch my incredible bedside lamp.

Whaa?!