The life of Thomas Edison Learn English through story level 3
thomas edison the man who invented the
electric
light bulb
[Music]
one day i was poor the next
i was rich i brought light to cities
and invented lots of new things
how did i do it i worked hard
but i also had good luck
i met the right people at the right time
[Music]
i was born in the united states
i went to school for only three months
because my teacher thought that i
caused trouble in the classroom
in fact i spoke in a loud voice
because i couldn’t hear very well
when i left school i was only seven
years
old my mother became my teacher
at home my parents had seven
children and i was the youngest
we didn’t have much money so when i was
12 years old
all my brothers and sisters worked
i decided to work too i got a job
on the railways and i sold food and
drinks
on trains one day i was at mount
clemons station when i saw a little boy
on the railway
there was a train coming and i ran to
save him
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the boy was the station master’s
three-year-old son
he wanted to thank me for saving his son
and taught me how to use the telegraph
i could get a better job now
from 1863 to 1867
i worked as a telegraph operator
i liked machines and i sometimes did
experiments
when i was 19 i had a job at the western
union company
in louisville one day
i was trying an experiment when i
spilled
acid in the office and lost my job
i moved to boston and invented a machine
to record votes no one was interested in
it
so when i was 22 years old i decided to
go to new york to make a new start
i knew one person in new york so i went
to see him
i haven’t got a job and i need some
money
could i borrow some from you i asked
he was surprised i can only
lend you a dollar he said
i took the dollar and promised to give
it back
this dollar changed my life
i was hungry and weak so i used the
dollar to buy a meal
i felt much stronger after my meal and i
went
out to look for a job i talked to a few
people
one of them was franklin pope
he worked for the gold indicator company
and he
showed me the company’s building i
stayed in the battery room that night
the next day i studied the company’s
machines
the third day was my lucky day
there was a machine that sent important
information
to the gold exchange suddenly
it stopped working
the people in the company didn’t know
what to do
but i knew what to do i repaired the
machine
dr samuel laws from the gold exchange
heard of my work he offered to pay me
three hundred dollars a month to repair
their machines
i was able to pay the dollar back
soon the president of the gold and stock
telegraph company
also heard of my work can you repair
the machines in our company he asked me
three thousand dollars or five thousand
dollars a year
was good pay for the job but he
offered me forty thousand dollars
i was lucky once again
this was the start of my career as a
businessman
and inventor i moved to new jersey
and i opened several telegraph companies
with franklin pope in 1870
mary stillwell got a job in one of my
companies
we got married the next year and had
three
children i was happy to have a family
but i didn’t have much time to be at
home
i had a lot of ideas for new inventions
in 1876 i built a research
laboratory at menlo park
formed a team and invented the
phonograph
a machine to play music and many other
things
my most important invention came next
every day when the sun set everything
was
dark we had electricity
but we had no electric light
after a lot of experiments and hours of
hard work at the laboratory
we invented the electric light bulb
the round glass object that produces
light
in 1882 i helped to put
400 lights in the streets of manhattan
new york got a new name the city that
never
sleeps i brought light to homes
hospitals offices factories
and schools it was the beginning of the
24
7 lifestyle 24 hours of light
seven days a week then
a sad day arrived in my life in 1885
my wife became ill and died
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but two years later i got married to
meena miller
and had three children
at work it was a time of success
i started more companies and invented
more things
i got one patent every 10 days
there were 1093 in total
then hard times came again in 1913
a big fire destroyed 13 of our buildings
the next year the first world war
started in europe
the government asked me to work on
inventions to find
guns and submarines i couldn’t work on
my
inventions anymore
during my life i started a lot of
companies
and invented many things one day
i was asked how did you do it
my answer was one percent inspiration
and 99 perspiration
hard work was the key