Word: inventors
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DIED. John W. Mauchly, 72, co-inventor of the first all-electronic computer; during heart surgery; in Abington, Pa. The Ohio-born physicist was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943 when he and Graduate Student J. Presper Eckert Jr. began building an electronic machine to replace mechanical devices. The ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), a 30-ton leviathan completed in 1946, was 1,000 times speedier than any other computer. After selling their company to the Sperry Rand Corp., the two devised smaller and even quicker machines, among them the celebrated UNIVAC, developed...
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...
...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...