Listening3 Thomas Edison

Q1：When and where was Edison born？

Q2：Why  Edison can be successful？

    Welcome to the VOA Special English program,People in America.Today, Sarah Long and Bob Doughty tell about the inventor Thomas Alva Edison.He had a major effect on the lives of people around the world.Thomas Edison is remembered most for the electric light,his phonograph and his work with motion pictures.

    Thomas Edison's major inventions were designed and built in the last years of the eighteen hundreds.However, most of them had their greatest effect in the twentieth century.It is extremely difficult to find anyone living today who has not been affected in some way by Thomas Edison. Most people on Earth have seen some kind of motion picture or heard some kind of sound recording.And almost everyone has at least seen an electric light.These are only three of the many devices Thomas Edison invented or helped to improve.People living in this century have had easier and more enjoyable lives because of his inventions.

    Thomas Alva Edison was born on February eleventh,]eighteen forty-seven in the small town of Milan, Ohio.He was the youngest of seven children.Thomas Edison was self-taught. He went to school for only three months.His teacher thought he could not learn because he had a mental problem.But young Tom Edison could learn.He learned from books and he experimented.At the age of ten,he built his own chemical laboratory.He experimented with chemicals and electricity.He built a telegraph machine and quickly learned to send and receive telegraph messages.At the time,sending electric signals over wires was the fastest method of sending information long distances.At the age of sixteen,he went to work as a telegraph operator.He later worked in many different places.He continued to experiment with electricity.When he was twenty-one,he sent the nited States government the documents needed to request the legal protection for his first invention.The government gave him his first patent on an electric device he called an Electrographic Vote Recorder.It used electricity to count votes in an election.

    In the summer months of eighteen sixty-nine,the Western Union Telegraph Company asked Thomas Edison to improve a device that was used to send financial information.It was called a stock printer.Mister Edison very quickly made great improvements in the device.The company paid him forty thousand dollars for his effort.That was a lot of money for the time.This large amount of money permitted Mister Edison to start his own company.He announced that the company would improve existing telegraph devices and work on new inventions. Mister Edison told friends that his new company would invent a minor device every ten days and produce what he called a "big trick" about every six months. He also proposed that his company would make inventions to order.He said that if someone needed a device to do some kind of work,just ask and it would be invented.

   Within a few weeks Thomas Edison and his employees were working on more than forty different projects.They were either new inventions or would lead to improvements in other devices.Very quickly he was asking the United States government for patents to protect more than one hundred devices or inventions each year. He was an extremely busy man. But then Thomas Edison was always very busy. He almost never slept more than four or five hours a night. He usually worked eighteen hours each day because he enjoyed what he was doing. He believed no one really needed much sleep. He once said that anyone could learn to go without sleep.