Word: edisons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Above all, Edison invented the first practical electric light, and a power-distribution system that put it cheaply into every home. Like much else about Edison, the precise date is in dispute, but the inventor himself remembered Oct. 21, 1879, as the day on which he began the test of the first successful light bulb...
...there lessons to be learned from the life and ways of the quintessential Yankee tinkerer that could help revive the flickering spirit of U.S. invention? Any understanding of the great inventor must begin by stripping away myths. Edison, who had a lust for glory and a constitutional inability to refrain from embellishing a good story, saw to it that that would be no easy job; he perpetrated an incredible number of myths about himself. He often boasted that he had never attended school for a single day. Untrue. He had at least three years of formal education as a child...
...talked so often about his need for no more than three hours' sleep a night that the story has become enshrined in biographies. A half-truth at best. When the Ford Motor Co. archives were opened in 1951, researchers found many pictures of Henry Ford and his pal Edison in laboratories, at meetings and on outings. In some of these photos, Ford seemed attentive and alert, but Edison could be seen asleep - on a bench, in a chair, on the grass. His secret weapon was the catnap, and he elevated it to an art. Recalled one of his associates...
...truth is somewhat less flattering to Edison than the myths. Like many a genius, he was often a terrible trial to those who had to get along with him. He disliked not only changing his clothes but bathing, damaged his health by subsisting on pie and coffee, and neglected his two wives and six children. He lavished material goods on them, but otherwise paid scarcely any attention to them; in fact he rarely slept at home, preferring the laboratory. His first wife died grossly overweight; his second once said their marriage had been "no great love." The Hollywood picture...
...make money; when he died in 1931 he left an estate of more than $2 million. Not bad for the depths of the Great Depression, but a puny sum compared with what a good businessman could have realized from Edison's inventions. Part of the reason for Edison's failure to capitalize on his own ideas was his fanatic resistance to any attempts to modify them. He insisted for too long that his cylinders made better recording devices than the more practical discs, and, because he had worked with direct current, he fought the introduction of alternating current...