Word: inventor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Pressler has brought along an inventor named Alexander Hamilton and his homemade "gasohol" still, an odd assemblage of galvanized buckets and tubs and funnels. Hamilton (no kin to the patriot) is a pleasant man with wire-rimmed glasses, mutton-chop whiskers, and the dirty fingernails of a chronic tinkerer. As Pressler watches proudly, Hamilton pours fermented corn mash into his contraption, plugs in an electric cord, and begins adjusting valves. A tiny stream of alcohol squirts into a plastic bucket. The odor of the alcohol mingles in the room with the disquieting scent of dementia...
...Edison's 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...
...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...