When I was a kid, the rule in the house was simple and clear: when I got home from school I was supposed to start doing my homework. What I wasn’t supposed to do – and what I, in fact, ended up doing most days – was to turn on the television and sit, slack-jawed and lethargic, in front of a few hours of old sitcoms.
Of course, I grew up to write and produce sit-coms for a living, which in many ways vindicates my disobedience. I can make a solid, and only slightly preposterous, argument that all of those hours procrastinating, ignoring my schoolwork and other responsibilities, were a kind of career training, like medical school or law clerking. I have taken this position with a straight face in the ensuing years, and almost no one accepts it, least of all my mother.
She knew, even if she wasn’t home, that I had been sitting stupidly in front of the television all afternoon. I’d hear her car pull up outside, or her keys rattle in the door lock, and I’d scramble to the television, hit the “off” button, and then scramble back to the table where I’d have already arrayed books and notebooks and pencils in an unconvincing still life arrangement. I’d bury my face in a book and barely acknowledge her as she entered the room, looking up bleary-eyed and with a pencil in my mouth as if working out some particularly challenging calculus problem.
If you’re younger than, say, 30, the following will make no sense to you: my mother would cross over to the television set – and it was a “set” in those days, a big chunky piece of plastic and glass and humming electronics – and she’d feel along the top. It would almost always be hot to the touch, which gave her a pretty exact sense of how my afternoon had been spent.
Electric things, I learnt over and over and over, get hot when they’re in use. Laptops, tablets, small game players – if you have to plug it in to make it work, it’s going to start getting warm.
Samsung, the South Korean mobile phone behemoth, has learnt the same lesson. Its signature mobile device, the Galaxy Note 7 – introduced with fanfare and the anticipation from some in the financial markets that it would be a powerful competitor to Apple’s profit powerhouse, the iPhone – has been recalled this week because it gets really, really hot. Hotter than my schoolboy television set, hotter than an old electric typewriter, the Galaxy 7 has a tendency to get hot enough to catch fire.
The problem is the battery. Something in its engineering or manufacture causes it, occasionally, to explode – leaking caustic acids and flaming ooze, which is a lot worse than an old TV set that’s hot to the touch. The phones have been banned on airplane flights worldwide and the company has issued an international recall and halted their production. No joke: if you’ve got one of these phones, turn it in and replace it with another model. Don’t, it should go without saying, turn it on and put it in your pocket. And for sure don’t put it against your ear.
We’re surprised by this piece of engineering and technology flaw because in many ways we’ve become spoilt. We expect miracles of our devices – they should work instantly and without hiccups, they should connect us to anyone on the globe within unmeasurable fractions of time, they should entertain us when we’re bored, they should suggest new things to do and see, and they should be reissued and re-engineered each year with even more undreamed-of magic.
And they shouldn’t explode.
But the truth is, ever since someone cast shadow-puppets onto a bare wall and told a story to the gathered audience, things that entertain us have been catching fire and exploding with a predictable regularity. Most of the films made worldwide before the beginning of the 1960s were shot on silver nitrate stock, which is a highly volatile and extremely inflammable material. The problem was, silver nitrate film renders the very best black-and-white image. The blacks are deep and true, and the whites are clear and glowing, and when projected with a white-hot projector’s bulb, the picture on the screen takes on a silvery dimension. Hence the phrase, “the silver screen”. Once it starts burning, it’s awfully hard to put out, as many Hollywood studios discovered, watching their film vaults – and priceless prints of now-lost motion pictures – go up in thick clouds of acrid smoke. There were fires in cinemas, too, claiming dozens and dozens of lives.
The rule, which we consumers of the newest and latest entertainment devices keep learning is this: whenever you combine a volatile material with a blazing-hot power source you’re asking for trouble. Silver nitrate film running through a projector lit by a white-hot incandescent bulb is not unlike combining an electricity-hungry mobile device with a rechargeable, powerful, embedded battery. We love to be entertained, but it will always come at a price, as my mother taught me years ago, when she put her hand on the television set and felt the heat. Later, I felt the heat too, but in a different way.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Los Angeles
On Twitter: @rcbl