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Edison   /ˈɛdɪsən/   Listen
Edison

noun
1.
United States inventor; inventions included the phonograph and incandescent electric light and the microphone and the Kinetoscope (1847-1931).  Synonyms: Thomas Alva Edison, Thomas Edison.






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"Edison" Quotes from Famous Books



... Burbank's grafting deeds Marconi's stunts, whose genius speeds A message on a wireless tack And makes of space a jumping-jack? Where now does Edison hold sway? Or ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... have become wrecks through accepting the advice to try "whisky night-caps." Edison recommends manual labor, instead of going to rest, for aggravated insomnia. He says sleep will soon ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... Edison, the electrician whose inventions are almost of the quality of miracles, and have given him worldwide celebrity, was born in Milan, Erie County, in 1847, of mixed American and Canadian parentage. His early boyhood was passed in ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... at Edison's reminiscent remark that, "In any trade any of my 'boys' made with Bergmann he always got the best of them, no matter what it was. One time there was to be a convention of the managers of Edison illuminating companies at Chicago. There were a lot of representatives from the East, and a private ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... led me to deem superfluous any of these qualifications; in fact, I should make the list a little longer were I to write it now, and should add, perhaps, the prudence of Franklin, the inventive power of Edison, and the talent for ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... manifesting themselves in no uncertain manner, mentally I was cool enough to cope with the visitant, and sufficiently calm and at ease to light the match upon my wrist, perceiving for the first time, with an Edison-like ingenuity, one of the uses to which goose-flesh might be put, and knowing full well that if I tried to light it on the sole of my shoe I should have fallen to the ground, my knees being too shaky to admit of my standing on one leg ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... being raised upon the ruins of the old, comparatively little progress had as yet been made in electric lighting. In particular, the great problem of the minute subdivision of the light remained unsolved. Edison had not then begun his experiments, and the incandescent light was not even dreamed of. To employ the arc light around the statue was out of the question, not only because the necessary appliances would detract from the beauty of the figure, but also on account of the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... on him in such a place as this," said he. "It's enough to scare any man. I'll have a row of electric lamps up here inside of six months, and you won't know it again, with a thousand candle-power Swan and Edison right here in front of ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle

... conditions that call for and develop the epistolary art have largely passed away. With our modern facility of communication, the letter has lost the pristine dignity of its function. The earth has dwindled strangely since the advent of steam and electricity, and in a generation used to Mr. Edison's devices, Puck's girdle presents no difficulties to the imagination. In Charles Lamb's time the expression "from Land's End to John O'Groat's" meant something; to-day it means a few comfortable hours by rail, a ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... intellectual way. The variations of humanity from righteousness must be deeply understood. Look at Booker T. Washington, or at Jacob A. Riis! What daring, what indefatigable toil, what insight, patience, and swerveless hope have been put into their task! Edison is said to have spent six months hissing S into his phonograph to make it repeat that letter, and many days he worked seventeen hours a day. Have many ministers ever bent themselves in this way to solve a special moral problem—that of, say, a disobedient child ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... did get into war someone like Edison would invent something quick, you know, and it would be all ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis

... scientist and the man of affairs, on the other hand, are concerned with the physical; therefore most of the time they dismiss consideration of the spiritual as being outside of their province. Of course many persons would disagree with this last statement. The genius of an Edison, they assert, is precisely like the genius of a poet. But if this were true, we should be moved by the mechanism of a phonograph just as we are moved by a poem, and we are not. We may be amazed by the invention, and still find our thoughts ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... it is more than eighty years since it was invented. In America, which in most recent times has become the classical land of the moving picture production, the history may be said to begin with the days of the Chicago Exposition, 1893, when Edison exhibited his kinetoscope. The visitor dropped his nickel into a slot, the little motor started, and for half a minute he saw through the magnifying glass a girl dancing or some street boys fighting. Less than a quarter of a century later twenty thousand theaters for moving pictures are ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg

... schools of the future will smile at the claims made by those of the present, just as the latter doubtless regard with pitying indulgence that school which, only a few years ago, in the person of one of its most famous members, Dr. Bouillaud, mercilessly condemned the exponent of Edison's invention, because the savant, listening to a phonograph for the first time, could not believe that it was anything else than ventriloquism! Instances of this kind are sufficiently numerous and recent not to be forgotten, in spite of ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... part of a factory to another. An electric current meter may be made by giving inclination to the disk, which is for this purpose made exceedingly small and delicate, by means of a heavy magnetic needle deflected by the current. This, like Edison's, is a direction meter; but a meter in which no regard is paid to the direction of the current can be made by help of an iron armature of such a shape that the force with which it is attracted to fill the space between the poles of an electro-magnet ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various

... Mr. Thomas A. Edison says: "The practical character of the physical apparatus, the clearness of the descriptive matter, and its entire freedom from mathematics, give the work a value in my mind superior to any other work on elementary physics ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various

... are marched a thousand miles or twenty yards, it is all the same. The private soldier is a machine that has no right to know anything. He is a machine that moves without any volition of his own. If Edison could invent a wooden man that could walk and load and shoot, then you would have a good sample of the private soldier, and it would have this advantage—the private soldier eats and the wooden man ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins

... I can not, of course, pretend to give here all the rules for those who "go afoot" and I can only say that the safest principle for correct behavior in this, as in many social matters, is the now famous reply Thomas Edison once made to the stranger who asked him with what he mixed his paints in order to get such marvellous effects. "One part inspiration," replied the great inventor, "and NINE parts perspiration." In other words, etiquette is not so much a matter of "genius" as of steady ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart

... Thomas A. Edison has contended for years that four hours' sleep a day was sufficient for any man. He has conducted experiments with a large number of men, giving careful attention to matters of diet and exercise, and the results have seemed in a measure to support ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton

... discussion of lamellar cataract, advocates the Piesbergen instrument, which makes 3,000 vibrations a minute, and is applied over the closed lids. I think the instrument best known is the one introduced by Malakow. For this purpose the point of an Edison electric pen is armed with a small ivory ball, and the vibration rate varies from 200 to several thousand a minute, the rapidly revolving ball being passed over the closed lids, in some instances directly ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various

... advertised and had been advertised to write this story for months. I dropped The Journal altogether, and begged him to represent me as a literary light of the finest color. This he did in a very strong letter to Daschoff, and I presented it this morning, but the Minister, like Edison, said he would let me know when he could see me. Then I wrote Breck a letter of thanks so elegant and complimentary that he answered with another, saying if his first failed he would try again. That means he is for me, and at the bureau they say whichever one he insists on will get in, but ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... working on the lamp together and it is almost finished. We are keeping the construction of it a secret because we want to spring it on Anderson, the foreman. I haven't told you about him. He is all up on electricity, knows as much about it as Edison, at least he almost says so at times, and he really does know a lot, but he is the one teacher in the whole bunch I don't like. There is a manner about him that makes you feel he has on a dress suit and a stovepipe hat ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon

... case. A group of people are photographed by Edison's new process—say Titiens, Trebelli, and Jenny Lind, with any two of the finest men singers the age has known—let them be photographed incessantly for half an hour while they perform a scene in "Lohengrin"; let all be done stereoscopically. Let them be ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... was too brilliant for a small area. How to divide and subdue it so as to render it suitable for house lighting, was still a difficult problem. Farmer, Sawyer, Mann, and Edison, all attacked it at nearly the same time, going back with singular accord from the voltaic arc principle to that of incandescence in a vacuum. Edison, the prodigy of the century in inventive genius, was ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... Watt or Edison of metallurgy come to make that earliest bronze implement? Well, it seems probable that between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age there intervened everywhere, or nearly everywhere, a very short and transient age of copper. And the reason for thus thinking is threefold. In the first place, bronze ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen



Words linked to "Edison" :   artificer, Thomas Alva Edison, inventor, discoverer



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