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presented to the winners. Sometimes politics plays an important
role in the judges’ decisions. Americans have won numerous
science awards, but relatively few literature prizes. No awards
were presented from 1940 to 1942 at the beginning of World War
II. Some people have won two prizes, but this is rare; others have
shared their prizes.

Text 4
Inventor of the Future
Thomas Edison was the greatest inventor who ever lived. He
gave the world the electric light, the motion picture camera, and he
made the first sound recordings.
If one person can be said to have led the world into the age of
technology it was Thomas Alva Edison. Not only did he invent
and perfect many of the technologies vital to the modern world, he
also set the standard for how research and development is done
today.
Edison was guided by his belief that genius is one per cent
inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. Consequently, he worked
day and night for much of his life. By the time he died in 1931, he
had patented over 1,100 inventions. Some were his own, but many
were improvements he had made to the inventions of others.
Edison’s career began in New York when he was 22. He
arrived in city penniless and was forced to sleep in the cellar of a
company which operated an information service for stockbrokers.
In those days, information was sent from place to place using
ticker tape, and one day, while Edison was in the building, the
system collapsed. Amid the chaos that followed, Edison offered to
fix the problem, and within minutes had the transmitters working
again. He was immediately given a job.
A year later, in 1870, Edison had saved enough money to
open his own company, manufacturing ticker tape machines. The
business did well, and Edison had plenty of time to concentrate on
his experiments and inventions. In fact, so productive was he that,
in six years, he patented over 120 inventions, in between running a
successful business, getting married and having two children.
Shortly after that, he moved his factory to Menlo Park,
New Jersey, where he established his first big laboratory. It was
here that Edison was to do his best work, and build his
international reputation. The factory would also set the standard

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