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　　导语：我们的现代生活充斥着这位天才的发明成果，从照明到录音。他在Menlo Park建立的“发明工厂”如今在硅谷得到传承。谁是这位生生不息的天才，他又留给我们这些后代哪些重要警示？

　　The Making of America: Thomas Edison

　　We're surrounded by the fruits of his genius, from electric light to recorded sound, while the example of his "invention factory" at Menlo Park lives on in Silicon Valley. So who was this tireless man, and what are his lessons for us today?

　　The Electrifying Edison

　　At Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Washington, children in Natosh Jones' third-grade class bend over model cars designed to run on solar power. Working with a team of professional scientists from NASA and other federal agencies, they're putting finishing touches on the cars. With a student body that is almost totally minority and predominantly poor, Martin Luther King is the kind of American public school that has too often failed its students, especially in science and mathematics. But today Jones' students are learning the way all trainee scientists should: hands-on, through the sort of dogged trial and error that has always been the preface to American invention, a method Thomas Edison helped pioneer. "I like it this way because I get to learn how to do things, and when people ask me what I'm doing, I can show them how I'm doing it, says 8-year-old Sinia Stewart. "It makes me want to make other things that you can do in science。

　　Let There Be Light

　　On Sept. 8, 1878, Thomas Edison journeyed to the Connecticut workshop of the inventor William Wallace to examine Wallace's prototype for an electric light. A reporter from the New York Sun tagged along. Edison had begun thinking about the problem of electric light. What drew him to Connecticut was Wallace's "arc light" system, which consisted of a steam-powered electric dynamo that pulsed current through two tall carbon sticks to create an eye-searing beam。

　　The Incredible Talking Machine

　　In the end, they named it the phonograph. But it might have been called the omphlegraph, meaning "voice writer." Or the antiPhone(手机上网) (back talker). Or the didaskophone (portable teacher). These are some of the names someone wrote in a logbook in Thomas Edison's laboratory in 1877, after Edison and his assistants invented the first rudimentary machine for recording and playing back sounds. From the first, they thought it would be used to reproduce the human voice, but they had no clear idea of its exact purpose。

　　Lights, Camera ... Edison!

　　Toward the end of MGM's 1940 biopic Edison, the Man, starring Spencer Tracy, an honor roll of Thomas Edison's achievements marches onto the screen: Fluoroscope! Mimeograph! Storage battery! And then to the heart of the matter for the film industry: Motion pictures! Projection machine! Talking pictures! In its golden age, Hollywood was paying tribute to the man who, nearly a half-century earlier, possessed the genius and foresight to invent the movies。

　　The Inventor

　　Although Thomas Edison created the technologies behind three enormous 21st century industries — electrical power, recorded music and movies — his greatest invention may have been the modern method of inventing. He basically came up with the contemporary system of research and development. Edison was not the lone genius tinkering in his garage (the model for that American archetype is Ben Franklin) but someone who gathered around him a team of innovative scientific minds. Edison's laboratories were the forerunners of the interactive technological think tanks of Apple, Google and Microsoft。

　　(文章来源：时代周刊美国版)