Word: work
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Edison's tireless work habits took shape during his childhood in Port Huron, Mich. His formal education, according to most accounts, lasted only three months; he quit school after a teacher pronounced him "addled." His mother, herself a former teacher, educated him for a while at home, but the boy's growing fascination with 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...
...work of a life may transcend the biography; a civilized person, the slave-owning hypocrite--or whatever he may have been beneath the impenetrable enamels of his character--formulated, in the Declaration of Independence, the founding aspiration of America and what is still its best self, an ideal that retains its motive force precisely because it is unfulfilled and maybe unfulfillable: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
There was a sort of magic about Edison, although it had nothing to do with illusions or misdirections. An assistant once described the Wizard at work, "displaying cunning in the way he neutralizes or intensifies electromagnets, applying strong or weak currents, and commands either negative or positive directional currents to do his bidding." But behind his arcane dexterity lay Edison's exhaustive research and his tenacious unwillingness to quit tinkering until a technical challenge had been met. "Genius," he famously remarked, "is about 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration." Or again, as he said in his autobiography, "There is no substitute...
...only one of the many contributions Edison made to the now ubiquitous technological environment. He created the look and sound of contemporary life. He cared not at all about the fame and wealth he earned as long as he was allowed to get on with his work. He never lost the relentless desire to learn and to make things that had animated him as a boy. He remained the most childlike of titans. Once, he was signing a guest book and came to the INTERESTED IN column. Edison wrote, "Everything...
...power--a compound of rebel cheekiness, stylistic innovation and a tragicomic vision of media power--has never waned. It remains a work that seduces the young and inspires the old with thoughts of what the medium can achieve. RUNNERS-UP Day for Night by Francois Truffaut; Chinatown by Roman Polanski...