Who Was Thomas Alva Edison 爱迪生 Chapter 6 Making Moving Pictures

In 1884, at the height of his success, Tom suffered a terrible loss. His wife Mary died of an illness. She was only twenty-nine years old.

Tom had his children stay in New York City. His electricity business was there. He wanted to spend as much time as possible with Marion, now twelve; Thomas, now eight; and little William, who was only five.

Then, in 1885, Tom met a young woman named Mina Miller¹. Her family was from Ohio. Mina’s father was a millionaire businessman and inventor who had developed a very successful machine for harvesting grain. He himself received ninety-two patents in his lifetime.

Tom fell in love with Mina almost at once. She was interesting and educated. He even taught her Morse code so that they could “talk” to each other secretly, even among friends. It is said that Tom tapped out, “Will you marry me?” on the palm of her hand, and Mina tapped back, “Yes.”

Mina and Tom were married in 1886 and moved to a grand home, Glenmont, in West Orange, New Jersey². “It is a great deal too nice for me, but it isn’t half nice enough for my little wife here,” Tom said.

Tom and Mina were happy together. He was still at work as much as he had been when Mary was alive. But since Mina’s father was also an inventor, perhaps she understood Tom’s world better.

Still, it wasn’t so easy for twenty-year-old Mina to become the young mother of three children. Nor was it easy for Marion, who was now fourteen and had become a companion to her father. Years later she said Mina “was too young to be a mother to me, but too old to be a chum.”

Mina and Tom had three children, Madeleine, Charles, and Theodore. Holidays above all were a time when Tom loved being at home with his large family. Mina planned lavish³ parties for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, but the Fourth of July was all Tom’s. Everyone had to go outside very early—even before breakfast—for the fireworks that Tom had made himself. After breakfast and naps for the younger children, they rushed out for more activities, like picnics of watermelon and ice cream, and so it went on into the evening, ending with another enormous display of fireworks.

Unlike Mary, Mina loved having company. She gave large dinner parties, which Tom often tried to avoid by pretending to be sick. Their guest book was filled with the names of famous people—airplane pioneer Orville Wright, author and lecturer Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf from the age of two, and automobile⁴ maker⁵ Henry Ford⁶. He wrote at the end of his stay, “Two of the best days I ever spent.”

Moving to Glenmont made Tom decide to leave his Menlo Park laboratory. He built a new laboratory complex a mile from his home in West Orange. He wanted it to be the best in the world. “I will have the best-equipped and largest facility . . . for rapid and cheap development of an invention,” Tom declared.

Tom had never forgotten his wish to give people what they wanted. Because of his great success with the electric light, he had the money, the power, and the influence to do it.

The West Orange complex opened in November 1887. It had a laboratory building three stories high. There was a physics lab, a chemistry lab, and a private lab just for Tom where he could focus and think without interruption.

But, for Tom, the center of West Orange was a large library with two galleries, a forty-foot ceiling, walls full of photographs and plaques⁷, and shelves filled with ten thousand books and magazines from all around the world. Here Tom had his desk and a conference table. And it was here that Tom met the public—friends, investors⁸, inventors, reporters, and editors.

West Orange was ten times larger than Menlo Park and at one time had as many as ten thousand workers. At any one time as many as thirty “companies” worked on projects, run by teams directed by Tom.

Along with new ideas, Tom never lost interest in improving his “baby,” the phonograph. He might wander away from it and work on other inventions, but he always came back to it.

Not everything was a success. One of the things the “Boys” talked Tom into making was a talking doll for a Boston company. A small cylinder⁹ was put inside the two-foot-tall doll. A handle to turn the cylinder came out of her back. The talking doll worked fine in the factory, reciting poems and popular nursery rhymes. But when she reached the stores—nothing. All the thumping¹⁰ and bumping along the way had disturbed the mechanism¹¹. Most of the dolls never said a word.

In August 1889, Mina and Tom sailed to Paris for the Universal Exhibition. This was like a big fair for showing new products from many countries. There was a huge Edison display. His phonograph was the most popular attraction. Only the new Eiffel Tower, the highest structure in the world at that time, had more visitors.



During this trip, Tom visited a Frenchman whose “photographic gun” had captured animals in motion, such as birds in flight.

Tom was interested in moving pictures. In October 1888 he had written, “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear. . . . This apparatus¹² I call a Kinetoscope— ‘Moving View.’”

Tom was a pioneer in developing a system for filming and showing moving pictures. His kinetograph was the camera, which took the pictures. His kinetoscope provided a way of looking at them.

In 1893 the first motion picture studio in America was built at West Orange. He named it the Black Maria.


About fifty feet long, the Black Maria was a weird-looking structure. It had a slanted¹³ roof that opened up with a pulley to let in the sun. It sat on a round platform with tracks like railroad tracks and moved around in a circle, following the path of the sun.

Filming in the Black Maria started in 1893. An early film showed a man sneezing, “performed” happily by a mechanic who worked at West Orange.

The first boxing match ever filmed starred heavyweight champion “Gentleman Jim” Corbett. Edison also filmed dance groups, acrobats¹⁴, clowns, jugglers, and even the World’s Strongest Man.

When Buffalo¹⁵ Bill’s Wild West show came to town, sharpshooter Annie Oakley was filmed there too. Most were short pieces that lasted about twenty or thirty seconds.

One of the first “stories” filmed at West Orange was about firemen. They are woken up by a fire alarm and rush off from the firehouse to a fire. They save a baby and put out the fire. There wasn’t any sound. Still, people were excited to look at it.

Tom’s main interest in movies was in making better equipment, like his kinetoscope and his kinetograph. But as time went on, he drifted away to work on other ideas. He was not as closely involved as he had been with the phonograph and the lightbulb. He offered suggestions to his team, but he let them do a lot of the ideas and improvements without him. Eventually, he decided¹⁶ to get out of the movie business.

 

THE EIFFEL TOWER

“LA TOUR EIFFEL” STANDS 984 FEET HIGH OVER THE CITY OF PARIS. IT TOOK THREE HUNDRED MEN TWO YEARS TO BUILD IT. IT IS MADE OF FIFTEEN THOUSAND PIECES OF IRON HELD TOGETHER BY 2.5 MILLION RIVETS¹⁷. IT CAN SWAY ALMOST FIVE INCHES IN STRONG WINDS. FORTY TONS OF PAINT ARE NEEDED TO COVER THE TOWER, WHICH REMAINED THE TALLEST STRUCTURE IN THE WORLD UNTIL 1930, WHEN THE CHRYSLER BUILDING, SOON FOLLOWED BY THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING, WAS ERECTED¹⁸ IN NEW YORK CITY.

THE EIFFEL TOWER WAS COMPLETED IN 1889 FOR THE HUNDRED-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. GUSTAVE EIFFEL’S DESIGN WON THE COMPETITION FROM AMONG THE SEVEN HUNDRED ENTRIES SENT IN. SOME YEARS EARLIER, HE HAD DESIGNED THE IRON SKELETON FOR THE INSIDE OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, AND HE SUPERVISED THE RAISING OF THIS FAMOUS LADY IN NEW YORK HARBOR IN 1886.

 

PHOTOGRAPHY

THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL PHOTOGRAPHIC PROCESS WAS THE DAGUERREOTYPE¹⁹, NAMED AFTER FRENCHMAN LOUIS J. M. DAGUERRE, IN 1837. IT PRODUCED A DETAILED²⁰ BLACK-AND-WHITE PICTURE AND WAS DESCRIBED AS A “MIRROR WITH A MEMORY.”

THE NEXT IMPORTANT BREAKTHROUGH CAME IN 1851 WHEN A BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHER, FREDERICK SCOTT ARCHER²¹, DISCOVERED A WAY TO MAKE AS MANY PRINTS AS HE WANTED TO OF AN IMAGE.

THEM, IN 1888, AMERICAN GEORGE EASTMAN INTRODUCED THE KODAK BOX CAMERA. IT WAS EASY TO CARRY AROUND, SO PHOTOGRAPHERS DIDN’T HAVE TO STAY IN AN INDOOR STUDIO WITH A DARKROOM NEARBY. IT WAS CHEAP AND EASY TO OPERATE, AND THE ROLL OF CELLULOID, OR PLASTIC, FILM COULD TAKE ONE HUNDRED BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS. THIS FILM MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR EDISON TO MAKE MOVING PICTURES.

1 miller   

n.磨坊主

参考例句：

• Every miller draws water to his own mill.磨坊主都往自己磨里注水。
• The skilful miller killed millions of lions with his ski.技术娴熟的磨坊主用雪橇杀死了上百万头狮子。

2 jersey   

n.运动衫

参考例句：

• He wears a cotton jersey when he plays football.他穿运动衫踢足球。
• They were dressed alike in blue jersey and knickers.他们穿着一致，都是蓝色的运动衫和灯笼短裤。

3 lavish   

adj.无节制的；浪费的；vt.慷慨地给予，挥霍

参考例句：

• He despised people who were lavish with their praises.他看不起那些阿谀奉承的人。
• The sets and costumes are lavish.布景和服装极尽奢华。

4 automobile   

n.汽车，机动车

参考例句：

• He is repairing the brake lever of an automobile.他正在修理汽车的刹车杆。
• The automobile slowed down to go around the curves in the road.汽车在路上转弯时放慢了速度。

5 maker   

n.制造者，制造商

参考例句：

• He is a trouble maker，You must be distant with him.他是个捣蛋鬼，你不要跟他在一起。
• A cabinet maker must be a master craftsman.家具木工必须是技艺高超的手艺人。

6 Ford   

n.浅滩，水浅可涉处；v.涉水，涉过

参考例句：

• They were guarding the bridge,so we forded the river.他们驻守在那座桥上，所以我们只能涉水过河。
• If you decide to ford a stream,be extremely careful.如果已决定要涉过小溪，必须极度小心。

7 plaques   

（纪念性的）匾牌( plaque的名词复数 )； 纪念匾； 牙斑； 空斑

参考例句：

• Primary plaques were detectable in 16 to 20 hours. 在16到20小时内可查出原发溶斑。
• The gondoliers wore green and white livery and silver plaques on their chests. 船夫们穿着白绿两色的制服，胸前别着银质徽章。

8 investors   

n.投资者，出资者( investor的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• a con man who bilked investors out of millions of dollars 诈取投资者几百万元的骗子
• a cash bonanza for investors 投资者的赚钱机会

9 cylinder   

n.圆筒，柱(面)，汽缸

参考例句：

• What's the volume of this cylinder?这个圆筒的体积有多少？
• The cylinder is getting too much gas and not enough air.汽缸里汽油太多而空气不足。

10 thumping   

adj.重大的，巨大的；重击的；尺码大的；极好的adv.极端地；非常地v.重击(thump的现在分词)；狠打；怦怦地跳；全力支持

参考例句：

• Her heart was thumping with emotion. 她激动得心怦怦直跳。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• He was thumping the keys of the piano. 他用力弹钢琴。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》

11 mechanism   

n.机械装置；机构，结构

参考例句：

• The bones and muscles are parts of the mechanism of the body.骨骼和肌肉是人体的组成部件。
• The mechanism of the machine is very complicated.这台机器的结构是非常复杂的。

12 apparatus   

n.装置，器械；器具，设备

参考例句：

• The school's audio apparatus includes films and records.学校的视听设备包括放映机和录音机。
• They had a very refined apparatus.他们有一套非常精良的设备。

13 slanted   

有偏见的； 倾斜的

参考例句：

• The sun slanted through the window. 太阳斜照进窗户。
• She had slanted brown eyes. 她有一双棕色的丹凤眼。

14 acrobats   

n.杂技演员( acrobat的名词复数 )；立场观点善变的人，主张、政见等变化无常的人

参考例句：

• I was always fascinated by the acrobats at the circus. 我总是着迷于马戏团里的杂技演员。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The acrobats' performance drew forth applause from the audience. 杂技演员的表演博得了观众的掌声。 来自《简明英汉词典》

15 buffalo   

n.(北美)野牛；(亚洲)水牛

参考例句：

• Asian buffalo isn't as wild as that of America's. 亚洲水牛比美洲水牛温顺些。
• The boots are made of buffalo hide. 这双靴子是由水牛皮制成的。

16 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

17 rivets   

铆钉( rivet的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Straighten the rivets, please. 请把那铆钉铆直。
• Instead of rivets there came an invasion, an infliction, and a visitation. 但是铆钉并没有运来，来的却是骚扰、混乱和视察。

18 ERECTED   

adj. 直立的，竖立的，笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立，建立

参考例句：

• A monument to him was erected in St Paul's Cathedral. 在圣保罗大教堂为他修了一座纪念碑。
• A monument was erected to the memory of that great scientist. 树立了一块纪念碑纪念那位伟大的科学家。

19 daguerreotype   

n.银板照相

参考例句：

• The inventor of the daguerreotype is a French artist.银版照相的发明者是位法国艺术家。
• The image was taken by louis daguerre who invented the daguerreotype-one of the earliest methods of photography.这张照片是由路易斯达盖尔拍摄，他发明了银版照相法-摄影的最早方法之一。

20 detailed   

adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的

参考例句：

• He had made a detailed study of the terrain.他对地形作了缜密的研究。
• A detailed list of our publications is available on request.我们的出版物有一份详细的目录备索。

21 archer   

n.射手，弓箭手

参考例句：

• The archer strung his bow and aimed an arrow at the target.弓箭手拉紧弓弦将箭瞄准靶子。
• The archer's shot was a perfect bull's-eye.射手的那一箭正中靶心。