filament of my imagination

October 21st, 1879
Menlo Park

It was on this memorable day, a rainy Tuesday, notes a biographer, that Thomas Alva Edison conducted the first successful test of the incandescent light bulb. And it was also the day Edison finally stopped cussing. Through long, frustrating, 99% sweating, days and nights of trial and error he invented a vast library full of expletives and four-letter words as experiment after experiment fizzled out.

A sampling of the milder exclamations jotted down in a diary by his assistant Edgar:
Rats!
You Worthless Pile Of Horse Poop!
Yeah, Your Mother Too!
Dog Hair?, Dog Hair My Left Arm Pit!
I Don't Know, It Was Hair I Found In My Soup, You Dip!

Science marches on!