Where's The Electric Light?

People have asked me, “What’s the big deal with this media trip?” and I really, if I am on the move, or at all involved in something, don’t get a chance to elaborate on the reason for my obsession. It might be something that is confined to people of a certain age: those born a decade before or a decade after World War 11, or even to people from a certain area: the counties right in the middle of Ireland; Offaly, Laois and Tipperary. Our corner of the Midlands, Banagher, Co. Offaly, balanced right on the edge of the Shannon, had some peculiarities that made the anticipation, the reception and the consideration of the implications of new media interesting from the very beginning.
Anthony Trollope, one of the most respected, and certainly one of the most prolific Victorian novelists, had been the Postmaster in Banagher in 1850, living in a house down at the beginning of Cuba Avenue Just down the road from where my brother, Peter, now lives. When it got dark in Anthony Trollope’s house, it is presumed that he used a lighting medium of his time, a lamp fueled by paraffin oil, increasing illumination by the use of a glass “hurricane” bulb.
And one hundred years later, in 1950, when it got dark in our house, we used the same method of illumination that had been employed by Trollope: the paraffin oil lamp. When it was time for me to go to bed on a winter night, I was accompanied into the room by my mother bearing the lamp; leaving the door slightly ajar, she would depart, leaving me in a darkness so profound that it is immeasurable, even inconceivable by anyone used to modern lighting.
What had been going on during the intervening 100 years? The rest of the world had not been standing still; they had built and sunk the Titanic. The Telegraph Cable, after great effort, had been dragged across the Atlantic, initiating the deluge of Communication that has grown exponentially ever since. Ahem…even WW1& WW11 had been waged and won or lost, depending on where in the world you were situated. Ireland, of course, with a great deal of pain and difficulty, worked its way through the “Troubles,” and Ireland, England and the rest of the world heard of these things as they occurred. We in Banagher had to depend upon word-of-mouth and the papers for the news. I was eight when we finally got the Electric Light on the Birr Road.