GRE素材之历史名人.doc

Edison（greatness of individuals, education, success, goals…… ） What made Edison so extraordinarily successful? He was by any reckoning a brilliant inventor, but there were many other fine, clever contemporary inventors, now mostly forgotten: Elisha Gray and George Phelps in telegraphy; Emile Berliner in telephony and sound recording; Edward Weston in electrical instrumentation; Elihu Thomson, Frank Sprague, and Nikola Tesla in electrical power and lighting. Edison outshone them all in the breadth of his accomplishments and the public renown he garnered. He broadened the notion of invention to include far more than simply embodying an idea in a working artifact. His vision encompassed what the twentieth century would call innovation—invention, research, development, and commercialization. Moreover, he combined a prodigious creativity with a canny sense of the emerging influence of the popular press, and therein lies the key to his historical stature. His mother Nancy had apparently taught school at some point, and his father Samuel, a political firebrand and freethinker, had a library that Edison was encouraged to read. He attended school briefly for two periods in Port Huron, but was largely taught at home by his mother. My mother taught me how to read good books quickly and correctly, he later said, and as this opened up a great world in literature, I have always been very thankful for this early training. At the same time he was learning the entrepreneurial ways of his father, whose many careers included land speculation, shingle making, and truck farming. The same entrepreneurial attributes ascribed to his father were later applied to Edison: a lively disposition always looking on the bright side of things and full of most sanguine speculation as to any project he takes in his head. In 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of the electric lamp, Henry Ford staged a ceremony attended by President and Mrs. Hoover and broadcast across the country. On Edisons death in 1931