Semester II Reading

Read the text. Mark the true (T) and false (F) statements.

Thomas Alva Edison

The American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, was born in Ohio in 1847.

Tom, or Al, as his family called him, was one of those children who are always asking "Why?" He was always trying to learn how things worked or how they were made. The boy's education was limited to three months in the public school of Port Huron, Michigan. He started work at the age of twelve, when a new railway was opened between Port Huron and Detroit. Young Edison began to travel every day on one of the trains. He sold fruit, sweets and cakes to the passengers. The hours that he had to wait at Detroit before starting back home, he spent in the library reading techni­cal books.

Several years later, Edison learned telegraphy and he became a tele­graph operator. He was soon one of the fastest operators in a large tele­graph company in Boston. He wanted to improve the telegraph system and worked very hard at it. Night after night he read the "Book of Experi­ments", by Michael Faraday, the inventor of the electric generator, in the hope that this would help him to solve his problems. He did not sleep more than four hours a night and sometimes he did not go to bed at all. He often did not even find time for breakfast.

"Aren't you going to stop to eat your breakfast?" his landlady once asked him. "No," he answered, "I've got so much to do, and life is short." After a few months of work, he built a transmitter of a new kind. This was his first important invention.

Edison was advised to go to New York where the opportunities were greater. He did so, but when he reached New York, he had no money left at all. "I had to walk in the streets all night because I hadn't the price of a bed; and in the morning nothing to buy breakfast with," he said.

But soon, he opened a small workshop. At the age of twenty he had two inventions.

One of Edison's greatest inventions was the gramophone, or the "pho­nograph", as he called it, which repeated his words. He told his assistants that this was only the beginning. The time would come, he said, when his new instrument would record music. "It will play symphonies and whole operas, the world will hear again the great singers who are no longer living..." Another of Edison's inventions was the electric lamp. Edison believed that only work could bring success. He continued ac­tive work until only eighteen days before his death in 1931, at the age of eighty-seven.

That evening, Americans all over the country turned off their electric lights for a few moments — the light which Edison had given them.

Thomas was always interested in different things.

Edison studied for some years in the public school.

Edison's first work was at the port.