Danny Baker is back on Saturday mornings, just as lively & full of ideas as before he got ill. But his voice has changed – thinner somehow, lost some of the lower harmonics & roughness, much less resonant as if it were coming from smaller, thinner tubes. I was wondering if it might be yet another of those strange side effects (like curly hair) of chemo, when he let slip that he no longer has saliva glands.
The human spirit, eh.
This morning’s little gem, for me, was learning that Edison claimed to have invented the sprocket, demanded royalties from anyone using them to project films & so was responsible for the nascent American film industry’s migration to the West Coast (I summarise Paul Merton’s account of his upcoming series on BBC television)
I just love that word sprocket. I think I must have first been introduced to it when my father insisted that I become a competent cycle mechanic (at the age of 10) before I was allowed out unaccompanied on my bike. I think I remember having something like a circular sprocket fixer in my saddlebag toolkit – I certainly had something with which to tighten a loose chain.
The OED finds the earliest use of a sprocket way back in 1536, when it meant ‘a triangular piece of timber used in framing, esp. one fastened on the foot of a rafter in order to raise the level of the eaves.’
It appears in 1750 to mean ‘A projection (either forked or simple) from the rim of a wheel, engaging with the links of a chain’, and by the 1890s is being used (in the sense of sprocket wheel) in the literature of both cycling & cinema.
I wonder if Edison got the idea from a bicycle?
Interesting to note that wheels played a part in cinema from the very beginning, when Roget wrote his paper on the persistence of vision after observing what happened to the wheels of passing carriages as he watched them through the railings surrounding his basement kitchen
