Word: began
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...faster and more reliable ways of doing business. An improvement Edison made in the stock ticker eventually earned him $40,000, a considerable sum at the time. He used this windfall to set up and staff a shop in Newark, N.J., to manufacture these tickers. But other companies began besieging Edison for technical advice, and in 1876 he moved his operation to Menlo Park and created the world's first industrial-research facility, a humming workplace dedicated to improving or creating new products for pay. Some think that Menlo Park itself, which showed the industrialized world a new method...
Before print, the ability to read was useful mainly to the elite and the trained scribes who handled their affairs. Affordable books made literacy a crucial skill and an unprecedented means of social advancement to those who acquired it. Established hierarchies began to crumble. Books were the world's first mass-produced items. But most important of all, printing proved to be the greatest extension of human consciousness ever created. It isn't over: the 500-year-old information revolution continues on the internet. And thanks to a German printer who wanted a more efficient way to do business...
...chemistry soon led him into a rigorous course of independent study. To pay for the materials needed for his experiments, Edison at age 12 got a job as a candy and newspaper salesman on the Grand Trunk Railway. By the time he was 16, he had learned telegraphy and began working as an operator at various points in the Middle West; in 1868 he joined the Boston office of Western Union. It was here that he read Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity and decided to work full-time as an inventor...
...known to science up to that time (the works of Aristotle and, after that, the new men who superseded him: Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes and Galileo, who died in 1642, the year Newton was born). Riding on the shoulders of giants--and correcting the giants where they went wrong--Newton began assembling and perfecting the Newtonian universe, a miraculously predictable and rational clockwork creation held together by his universal gravitation and regulated by his elegant laws of motion...
...Industrial Revolution The steam engine began to power the press; the rotary press (invented in 1846) allowed runs of 20,000 sheets an hour...