Inverse Time Element

I was writing about the Aurora Borealis I still can’t believe I missed, when the guy I’d called to fix our heat pump showed up and I got distracted. Within a few minutes, the heat pump guy told me the heat pump was a goner, and there was no electricity reaching the pump either, so I’d need an electrician to fix that before he could sell me a new pump. Miraculously, an electrician was available within the hour who confirmed the death of the heat pump and fixed the electricity problem. While he was here, I experienced a familiar surge of pride that I’ve never been able to subdue whenever a new electrician is in the house.

Truth is, I know very little about how electrical equipment works even though there’s a lot of electricity running through my family history. My mom ran the physics lab at Bryn Mawr College for starters. When I was in high school, she tried to explain her experiments to me, but I was too distracted by high school distractions to pay attention, much to her chagrin. A couple of decades later I was married to an electrician for fifteen years, even worked for him once when he broke his arm. He talked me through various jobs to keep his business afloat. I only managed to zap myself once during that month or so. Not too bad.

But the real pride comes from my great-grandfather who started a company called I.T.E Circuit Breaker Company in the late 19^th Century, and my grandfather who later ran the company, both of whom were inventors and businessmen. Between the two of them, they earned over seventy patents having to do with electrical equipment. My father, my uncle, and a couple of great-uncles worked for the company too until it was taken over in the late ‘60s. My grandfather’s first big contract was to design and install the bus bars for the Hoover Dam. (Bus bars, if you’re like me and didn’t know, are the copper bars that carry electricity collected from generators, raise the voltage, then move it to the transmission lines that ultimately power heat pumps and everything else we turn on). I learned all of this (again, it was refresher) from my Uncle John who is in his mid 90s and happened to be home watching the Phillies win when I called him this afternoon. He was more than happy to answer my questions about our family’s electrical history. All of this was stirred up this morning when the new electrician and I were standing in front of our electrical panel (not filled with I.T.E. breakers, but rather with a competitor’s, an acceptable brand according to my uncle). I always feel compelled to tell electricians about my grandfather and great-grandfather. The guy this morning was a little more interested than most, but not much.

Whenever I.T.E. comes up in family conversations, the older generation always asks the very question my uncle asked me today: do you know what I.T.E. stands for? I know I should know, have it memorized, but I don’t, so Uncle John reminds me. It means Inverse Time Element, which is to say: The bigger the problem, the shorter the time you want a breaker to take to turn the power off. I’m not sure there’s a metaphor or life lesson there, but it sure feels like there is.

I snagged this image of the Aurora Borealis from the internet. There was no attribution given to the photographer, or the location.