“Are we done?”

Re-reading Eric Newby’s ‘Short walk in the Hindu Kush’ put me in a travel-writing frame of mind, so I shamelessly grabbed a Bill Bryson off the shelves. Never lets you down. Here he is on the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, which is

…filled with the most indescribable assortment of stuff – machinery, railway trains, refrigerators, Abraham Lincoln’s rocking-chair, the limousine in which John F. Kennedy was killed (nope, no bits of brain on the floor), George Washington’s campaign chest, General Tom Thumb’s ornate miniature billiard-table, a bottle containing Thomas Edison’s last breath. I found this last item particularly captivating. Apart from being ridiculously morbid and sentimental, how did they know which breath was going to be Edison’s last one? I pictured Henry Ford standing at the death-bed shoving a bottle in his face over and over and saying, ‘Is that it?’