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民國63年 復興版高中英文課本 第二冊 第四課
A Great Inventor (1)
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847. AS a very young child, he liked to read, but for some reason he never did well in school. Edison himself remarked in later years, "I remember I never was able to get along in school. I don't know why it was, but I was always at the foot of the class."
Edison spent only three months in school. He continued his education at home, however, by reading with his mother, who never lost faith in her son. Early in his teens, Edison had to begin work for the support of his family. First he became a newsboy. Then he worked for the railroad, selling books, newspapers, toys, candy and peanuts. The nation was in the early days of the Civil War, and people were especially interested in the news. Buying some old type, Tom decided to print his own newspaper on the railroad train. His Weekly Herald, a simple newspaper of 16 inches by 12, proved a great success. In four years, Tom earned two thousand dollars, which he all gave to his parents.
In the meantime, Tom was busy with scientific experiments. In the same railroad car where he kept his printing press, he had a laboratory, with old tins, bottles of chemicals, and so on. For some time, all went well. But one day a bottle of phosphorus fell to the floor and started a fire. Tom soon put the fire out, but his employer, the train conductor, was very angry. He boxed the boy's ears and threw him off the train at the next station. Because of that boxing, Tom's right ear could hear nothing for the rest of his life.
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Edison was sad but not discouraged. He returned home and continued his experiments in the attic of the house. He put necks of bottles around ordinary wire for insulation, and tied wire from tree to tree between his home and the homes of his neighbors. These wires became Tom's telegraph lines. But one night a cow, returning home through the trees, walked into the telegraph lines and fell, with the wires all round her legs. The cries and noise soon brought the neighbors out of their houses--and that was the end of Tom's home telegraph.
A Great Inventor (2)
Edison was never discouraged. He was always eager to learn, and never hesitated to help others. Once he saved the son of a station master from the wheel of a speeding train. He became a telegraph operator, but again he lost his job because of his experiments. He moved from city to city, getting jobs and losing or leaving them. In the public library of Detroit, he finished reading "about fifteen feet" of books. In Cincinnati, he bought for two dollars a great pile of old magazines. Carrying them under both arms, he started for home of three o'clock in the morning, and was taken for a thief by a policeman.
When Edison was twenty-one, people were beginning to take an interest in his experiments. Some of his inventions were sold. When he was paid, he used the money for more experiments. A friend has described Edison's life in those days. "I cam in one night," said the friend, "and there sat Edison with a pile of books, five feet high, which he had ordered from New York, London, and Paris.
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He studied them night and day, eating at his desk and sleeping in his chair. At the end of the six seeks, he had read all the books, written a book about the ideas in them, and made two thousand experiments on the formulas which he had found in the books."
The years after 1873 were very important years for Edison and for the world. The results of his work included the electric light, the phonograph, the kinetoscope...which helped later inventors create the modern motion picture machine. He invented the mimeograph for making copies of printed material, and the electric storage battery, which was later used in subways and streetcars.
As Edison grew older, he never lost his interest in science. Even as an old man he continued to work in his laboratory, with such interest that he hated to stop for lunch even on his birthday. His work ended only with his death, in 1931, at the age of eighty-four.
