Thomas Edison :: essays research papers fc

Edison was born in the village of Milan, Ohio, on Feb. 11, 1847, and his family later moved to Port Huron, Mich. In his early life as a kid he played jokes on people and got into trouble. One time he set his father's barn on fire because he wanted to see what fire look like when it burned. His schooling was three months long because he quit when too many people made fun of him. At the age of seven his mother taught him, and he loved to read books. The book Schoool of Natural Philosophy sparked his likeing for science and, soon after he set up his first lab. At age 12 his father could no longer buy supplies for his lab so he became a train-boy, selling magazines and food on the Grand Trunk Railroad. He spent all he earned on books and supplies for his laboratory.At this time he stoped sleeping and only took cat-naps so he could work on experiments at night in the bagage car. An accident at this time led to a loss of hearing about 50%. Two things which contributed to loss of his hearing was a conductor pulling on his ear and, a conductor clapping his ears for setting the bagage car on fire it was only an accident. Soon after he left this job. A station agent taught him telegraph code and procedures, and at age 15, Edison became manager of a telegraph office. His first inventions were the transmitter and receiver for the automatic telegraph. At 21, Edison made improvements on the stock ticker for printing stock-exchange quotations. With the $40,000 he was paid for the improvements in tickers, he established real laboratory in Newark, N.J. Deciding to give up manufacturing, he moved the laboratory to Menlo Park, N.J., where he was in charge of groups of employees working on various projects. In 1878, Edison started work on an electric lamp and looked for things that could be electrically heated to incandescence in a vacuum. At first he used platinum wire in glass bulbs at 10 volts.He realized, however, that independent lamp control would be necessary for home and office use. He then developed a three-wire system with a supply of 220 volts. Each lamp operated at 110 volts, but the higher voltage required a new substance other than that of platinum. Edison conducted an extensive search for another filament material, on Oct.

Capitalism and United States Essay

There are many aspects of FDR’s New Deal that must be analyzed in order to determine if this collection of economic programs helped or hurt America’s effort in ending the Great Depression. The Great Depression caused both a decline in national moral and economic productivity unprecedented in United States history. The previously prestigious capitalistic economy was brought to its knees on Black Thursday in October of 1929. Roosevelt had taken office with the intent to quickly relieve a nation from Hoover’s â€Å"do-nothing approach† within his first 100 days as president. He knew he had to act fast in order to fulfill the demands of the people that could be, in part, credited because of their investments in the stock market with unstable funds. There was a rebellion in full swing. As recorded in A People’s History of the United States, â€Å"Desperate people were not waiting for the government to help them; they were helping themselves.†After the stock market crashed, the flaws in the capitalist system were more predominantly brought to surface. The system had been given a bad name among a growing socialist nation in times of desperation. To a socialist critic, the system could be depicted as unsound by nature; neglecting human needs in the pursuit of large corporate benefits. The New Deal was set in place to save capitalism from itself. In order to do this Roosevelt felt that passing a number of social programs would keep the market economy from, once again, self destructing. Through his efforts, Roosevelt had consequently formed class warfare. The faces of business leaders had become the faces of bloodthirsty, evil men which appealed largely to an American public looking for someone, something, or anything to blame for the pain they were going through. Finding that happy-medium between relieving the economic crisis of the American people and not giving the public something they could view as a government fall-back was something that the country had never had to deal with before on this large of a scale. Throughout Roosevelt’s implementation of his social programs concerns surfaced from conservative Americans. Roosevelt did not want welfare to be seen as â€Å"a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.† FDR’s New Deal, under a growingly socialist system, in ways got the country back on its feet and may have been the fix that America was looking for at the time. At the same time; however, it could have been the spark to the gradual lazy, entitled attitude that we experience today in the United States.

Achievement of the American Dream of an African American...

The Huxtable family in The Cosby Show represents the overarching achievement of the American dream through an African American family. According to Marvin Riggs’s 1992 documentary Color Adjustment there were two types of images of African Americans in the media. On one hand, the news showed the social and racial tensions that enveloped the post-civil rights era. On the other hand, primetime television depicted social harmony among the races–an image that most Americans understood as inaccurate. In the 1980s, most African Americans lived below the poverty line and primetime television hesitated to present that challenged ideology of the American Dream to the viewing public. Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues, in Color Adjustment, that the Black urban sitcoms demonstrated both the greatest potential for representing Black life in television’s history and also the greatest failure. Residing comfortably in a Brooklyn brownstone, the Huxtables embodied a nuclear and solid family resolving everyday issues of urban life, showing that African Americans could move beyond the stereotypical realm of crooks and servants. The world of the Huxtable family created an aspirational fantasy for minorities groups. The â€Å"I’m With The In Crowd† episode succeeds in creating this sense of hope for African Americans by idealizing the Huxtable family through the use of costume and set design, while perpetuating certain African American stereotypes through acting methods and the non-diegetic laughter ofShow MoreRelated Prejudice and Discrimination are Alive and Well Essay1594 Words   |  7 Pagesperson in a high position, or acting the leading role in a movie, this has been going on since the start of movies and television. In fact, Hattie McDaniel, in 1939, played a maid in Gone With the Wind, and although she was one of the stars of the show, it did not change the assumptions that black women should be representatives as servants to white wome n. Some contemporary films that also distorts the view of black women are, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Passion Fish, these two films offered viewersRead MoreLena Horne9265 Words   |  38 Pagesto 2000 and brought her three Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989; she appeared in 16 feature films and several shorts between 1938 and 1978; she performed occasionally on Broadway, including in her own Tony-winning one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in 1981-1982; and she sang and acted on radio and television. Adding to the challenge of maintaining such a career was her position as an African-American facing discrimination personally and in her profession duringRead MoreEssay about Gendered Media9688 Words   |  39 Pageswhite men as women (Basow, 1992 p. 159), or children’s programming, in which males outnumber females by two to one, or newscasts, in which women make up 16% of newscasters and in which stories about men are included 10 MEDIA’S MISREPRESENTATION OF AMERICAN LIFE The media present a distorted version of cultural life in our country. According to media portrayals: White males make up two-thirds of the population. The women are less in number, perhaps because fewer than 10% live beyond 35. Those who