Word: forlying
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Edison's tireless work habits took shape during his childhood in Port Huron, Mich. His formal education, according to most accounts, lasted only three months; he quit school after a teacher pronounced him "addled." His mother, herself a former teacher, educated him for a while at home, but the boy...
Some have dismissed the Declaration as merely eloquent propaganda--a sort of fancy mission statement for an insurrection. The only response is to observe the power of language to alter history. Jefferson explained, "I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether... It...
In later years, he discerned how democracy could be distorted, pointing to Republican France and Napoleon (a "wretch," Jefferson declared, of "maniac ambition"; he added "Having been, like him, entrusted with the happiness of my country, I feel the blessing of resembling him in no other point"). Jefferson stitched together...
In 1926 the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "The greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention of the method of invention." That method, Whitehead added, "has broken up the foundations of the old civilization." Thomas Alva Edison never thought of himself as a revolutionary; he was a hardworking...
There was a sort of magic about Edison, although it had nothing to do with illusions or misdirections. An assistant once described the Wizard at work, "displaying cunning in the way he neutralizes or intensifies electromagnets, applying strong or weak currents, and commands either negative or positive directional currents to...