GRE素材之历史名人.doc

Edison（greatness of individuals, education, success, goals ）What made Edison so extraordinarily successful? He was by any reckoning a brilliant inventor, but there were many other fine, clever contemporary inventors, now mostly forgotten: Elisha Gray and George Phelps in telegraphy; Emile Berliner in telephony and sound recording; Edward Weston in electrical instrumentation; Elihu Thomson, Frank Sprague, and Nikola Tesla in electrical power and lighting. Edison outshone them all in the breadth of his accomplishments and the public renown he garnered. He broadened the notion of invention to include far more than simply embodying an idea in a working artifact. His vision encompassed what the twentieth century would call innovationinvention, research, development, and commercialization. Moreover, he combined a prodigious creativity with a canny sense of the emerging influence of the popular press, and therein lies the key to his historical stature. His mother Nancy had apparently taught school at some point, and his father Samuel, a political firebrand and freethinker, had a library that Edison was encouraged to read. He attended school briefly for two periods in Port Huron, but was largely taught at home by his mother. My mother taught me how to read good books quickly and correctly, he later said, and as this opened up a great world in literature, I have always been very thankful for this early training. At the same time he was learning the entrepreneurial ways of his father, whose many careers included land speculation, shingle making, and truck farming. The same entrepreneurial attributes ascribed to his father were later applied to Edison: a lively disposition always looking on the bright side of things and full of most sanguine speculation as to any project he takes in his head.In 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of the electric lamp, Henry Ford staged a ceremony attended by President and Mrs. Hoover and broadcast across the country. On Edisons death in 1931 the president asked the nation to dim its lights in his honor.Galileo Galilei (observation, greatness, science,)was an Italian scientist who formulated the basic law of falling bodies, which he verified by careful measurements. He constructed a telescope with which he studied lunar craters, and discovered four moons revolving around Jupiter and espoused the Copernican cause.Fantoni left the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa in 1589 and Galileo was appointed to fill the post (although this was only a nominal position to provide financial support for Galileo). Not only did he receive strong recommendations from Clavius, but he also had acquired an excellent reputation through his lectures at the Florence Academy in the previous year. The young mathematician had rapidly acquired the reputation that was necessary to gain such a position, but there were still higher positions at which he might aim. Galileo spent three years holding this post at the university of Pisa and during this time he wrote De Motu a series of essays on the theory of motion which he never published. It is likely that he never published this material because he was less than satisfied with it, and this is fair for despite containing some important steps forward, it also contained some incorrect ideas. Perhaps the most important new ideas which De Motu contains is that one can test theories by conducting experiments. In particular the work contains his important idea that one could test theories about falling bodies using an inclined plane to slow down the rate of descent. Leonardo DA VINCI (b. 1452, Vinci, Republic of Florence now in Italy-d. May 2, 1519, Cloux, Fr.), Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. His Last Supper (1495-97) and Mona Lisa (1503-06) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of his time.Newton (science, observation, progress in one area, greatness)laid the foundation for differential and integral calculus. His work on optics and gravitation make him one of the greatest scientists the world has knownNewtons greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. By 1666 Newton had early versions of his three laws of motion. He had also discovered the law giving the centrifugal force on a body moving uniformly in a circular path. However he did not have a correct understanding of the mechanics of circular motion.From his law of centrifugal force and Keplers third law of planetary motion, Newton deduced the inverse-square law.Einstein contributed more than any other scientist to the modern vision of physical reality. His special and general theories of relativity are still regarded as the most satisfactory model of the large-scale universe that we have.Puritanism, Puritans (Politics and morality) They encouraged direct personal religious experience, sincere moral conduct, and simple worship services. Worship was the area in which Puritans tried to change things most; their efforts in that direction were sustained by intense theological convictions and definite expectations about how seriously Christianity should be taken as the focus of human existence, the Bible provided t