Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Thomas Edison
Inventor Nikola Tesla turned to an old trick to sell the brilliant concept of alternating current, which would enable the electrical power grid and the modern machines that run off it.
In the fall of 1887, Nikola Tesla was scared. Three years earlier, he had emigrated from Europe to New York City, set on becoming an electrical inventor.
1. 1606: The Virginia Company is formed to seek profit from a new business: American settlement.
2. 1612: John Rolfe plants West Indian tobacco in Virginia, the cash crop that assures the colony’s success.
How a debt-ridden banana republic became the greatest economic engine the world has ever known
Wildlife, Shells, and Thomas Edison’s Laboratory
The literature pants harder and harder to keep up with the proliferation of innovations, but, with a gun to my head, this is for the general reader looking for a short list of books that are technically sophisticated, yet highly readable.
Let there be incandescent light.
Thomas Edison's gift to the Christmas season
It changed the course of capital punishment in America.
Capitalism sometimes operates in unexpected ways and turns up in unexpected places. It can even be involved in what has been, legally, a monopoly of the state since the time of King Henry II—capital punishment.
The great democratic art form got off to a very rocky start. People simply didn’t want to crowd into a dark room to look at a flickering light, and it took nearly 20 years for Americans and motion pictures to embrace each other.
On July 5, 1896, the Los Angeles Times greeted the imminent arrival of Thomas Alva Edison’s moving-picture projector with enormous enthusiasm: “The vitascope is coming to town.
I spent the summer of 1964, between my junior and senior years in hish school, doing yardwork for various neighbors in the village of Bronxville, New York.
For 200 years, the United States patent system has protected, enriched, and befuddled inventors. As a tool of corporate growth in a global economy, it is now more important than ever.
In a decision of far-reaching significance, a federal circuit court in 1985 ruled that the Eastman Kodak Company had infringed the instant-camera patents held by Polaroid.
In 1979, RCA announced that it was developing what it called Selectavision, a process that, using Thomas as Edison’s basic technique for recording sound but now hooked up to a television set, produced pictures as well. Edison, no doubt, would have loved it.
The men and women who labored in the ghostly light of the great screen to make the music that accompanied silent movies were as much a part of the show as Lillian Gish or Douglas Fairbanks.
If I ever kill anyone,” D. W. Griffith once exclaimed, “it won’t be an actor, but a musician.” He had been arguing with Joseph Carl Breil, his collaborator on the score for The Birth of a Nation.
What happened when the richest man in America decided to collect one of everything
The whole curious enterprise puzzled Americans in the 1920’s.
Lighting Up America
“Remember,” Thomas Edison liked to say, “nothing that’s good works by itself, just to please you; you’ve got to make the damn thing work.” One hundred years ago this October, after trying to make the damn thing work for thirtee
Fifty European nations came to America on her hundredth birthday—and, for the first time, took her seriously
Centennials don’t make sense. It should be evident that a hundredth anniversary is a mere numerical happenstance without historic significance.
Three Americans created the art of the motion picture, and made it the universal language of the twentieth century
The older arts, all seven of them—architecture, dance, drama, literature, music, painting, and sculpture—had their origins in the Mediterranean basin several thousands of years ago.
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