Word: greats
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...laboratory-disassembled in Menlo Park, N.J., by his good friend Henry Ford, then crated and shipped to Dearborn along with seven railroad cars full of the clay soil on which it sat-the audience will watch a re-enactment of the scene. Madeline Edison Sloane, the inventor's great-granddaughter, will throw the switch that opened a new era. As the German historian Emil Ludwig described the original event, "When Edison snatched up the spark of Prometheus in his little pear-shaped glass bulb, it meant that fire had been discovered for the second time, that mankind had been...
...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...
...precisely defined the ingredients necessary for a society to generate innovation. Historian Barbara Tuchman notes that the 12th and 13th centuries enjoyed "one of civilization's great bursts of development," with the introduction of the compass, the spinning wheel and the windmill. Mid-19th century Europe and the U.S. enjoyed similar explosions. But why? Perhaps necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and the demands of the current energy and environmental crises may yet revive the spirit of the Yankee tinkerer...
...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...
...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 of Edison as a dedicated battler for the good of humanity could hardly be more wrong. Much as his inventions did benefit humanity, Edison's object was to make money, as much as he could. His first patent was on a device for automatically and speedily...