Word: edisons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...centennial of Edison's great achievement comes at a time when American innovative genius, so well personified by Edison, has begun to fade. The nation that produced Robert Fulton, Robert Goddard, Edmund Land and many others now has far fewer folk-hero tinkerers. Laments James G. Cook, president of the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation: "Over the past decade, America has been losing its traditional leadership in technological innovation. Our Edison-like spirit of inventiveness seems to be going the way of the gas lamp...
Where are you, Edison, now that we need...
...Thomas Alva Edison was also the most prolific inventor who ever lived; without his gadgets modern life would be inconceivable. The phonograph, the movie camera, the microphone, the mimeograph, the stock ticker-they only begin the list. Though Alexander Graham Bell devised the first telephone transmitter and receiver, it was Edison who worked out a system of reproducing phone conversations over long distances loudly enough that they could be heard easily, and who may have been the first to shout "hello" into a telephone mouthpiece. His one discovery in basic science-the "Edison effect," the emission of electrons from...
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...