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TELEVISION

An important thing can have a small beginning. The first television picture that was ever seen was not exciting. It was only a picture of a face, and the picture only traveled a few meters. But to the inventor, John Logic Baird, it was wonderful.

Baird had always been interested in science, but not all of his experiments had been successful. In 1900, when he was twelve years old, he and some friends built a private telephone system. It worked well, but one night a storm pulled down the wires that the boys had stretched across the street. A man who was standing in the street was hurt by the falling wires, and the boys' telephone system had to be closed down. A few years later, Baird and a classmate built a plane, which they launched (with John in it) from a roof. Luckily, when the plane crashed, it fell on some grass, so John wasn't badly hurt.

After studying electrical engineering at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, Scotland, John Baird went to the University of Glasgow. When he finished school, he got a job in a power station that supplied electricity to the Clyde Valley in Scotland. When he used the power supply at the station for one of his experiments, all of the electricity in the Clyde Valley was cut off! That was the end of his job.

Baird went to Hastings. He thought about some inventions that he was interested in. One of his ideas was transmitting pictures by wireless. He worked with an old motor that he had found in the junk behind an electrician's shop, a metal cookie container, an old wireless telegraph, some needles, flashlight batteries, and pieces of wood. He almost killed himself several times by touching the wrong wires. For three years, he worked alone.

Finally, on October 2, 1925, Baird transmitted a picture of a human face - the face of a fifteen-year-old boy. In January 1926, members of the Royal Institution came to see his invention. Baird's demonstration was a success.

By 1929, the public had become interested television. In September of that year, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), which controlled all broadcasting in England, started experimental transmission with Baird's equipment. However, other companies and inventors in England and the United States had discovered better transmission methods. In 1937, when the BBC examined all of the existing television systems, Baird's was not chosen. John Baird was not discouraged, however, and continued to work on other inventions.(2048)

Watching TV

Many people have already forgotten what the world was like before television. Several generations of children have grown up with a TV-set as a baby-sitter, teacher and a companion. It has become an integral part of our lives. No medium (CMU) can compare with television as a means of information, entertainment and education.(283)

Our Solar

1. Have you ever tried to count the stars in the night sky? No­body knows how many there are. A group of stars is called a galaxy, and there are millions of galaxies in the universe. Our sun is one of the smallest stars on the edge of our galaxy, the Milky Way.



2. Let's imagine a tour of our solar system. We begin our jour­ney from the sun, but of course we could never live there - the temperature on the surface is 6000°C! The first planet we see is Mercury. It is strange because the same side always faces the Sun, so one Half of the planet is very hot and the other side is extremely cold. It orbits the Sun once every 88 days. The

next planet we see is cloudy Venus, which has an atmosphere of poisonous gases and temperatures of up to 500°C! Our Earth is the next planet we pass on our journey.

3. After Earth is Mars, which is the nearest planet to the Earth. Mars is not very warm. Temperatures can fall to - 100°C. Spacecraft have landed on Mars a number of times, first in 1976 and more recently in 1997. We now know more about Martian rocks and the Martian atmosphere. Some scientists now believe there used to be primitive life on Mars because there is frozen water there.

4. The next four planets on our tour are giants. The enormous Jupiter has a moon called Europa where scientists think there may also be water. Next is Saturn, famous for its colourful rings of rock and ice which go round it. We know very little about the other two giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, and less about tiny Pluto, the furthest planet from the Sun. Pluto takes 248 Earth years to go round the Sun!(1299)

The Problems of Inventors

Many of the modem world's most famous discoveries and inventions were not made by scientists, but by amateur inventors. Often, these inventors had such unusual ideas that they were laughed at. But people like these, working on their own, gave us many of the things we use every day.

Clarence "Bob" Birdseye, who invented frozen foods, was both a successful inventor and a good businessman-. But it took him years to overcome the biggest problem of successful inventions -convincing people to try something new and different. Birdseye first tried to freeze fish. After years of experimenting with the process, he started Birdseye. Seafoods, Inc. But the company soon went bankrupt. Even though the process worked, people didn't believe that frozen fish could possibly be good. It took a long time, but people finally accepted frozen food. By the end of his life, Birdseye, who was a completely self-taught inventor, had 100 patents that he sold for a total of 22 million dollars.

Few inventors were as successful as Birdseye. Some, like the original owners of Coca-Cola, didn't realize the potential of their discoveries. The son of the inventor of Coca-Cola sold the recipe for $2,300. Today the product is worth billions of dollars. In 1853, Karl Gerhardt invented aspirin, but he didn't know what to do with it. Fifty years after his invention, a German company discovered that it was a painkiller and has since made millions selling it. Edwin Armstrong invented FM radio, but he spent his whole life trying to protect his invention. Competitors stole his patents, and companies cheated him out of money. Finally, he became so frustrated with his failures that he ended his life by jumping out of a window.

Most great inventors, like Gerhardt and Armstrong, made little or nothing from their inventions. The first person with a new idea may get attention, but he also gets the problem of an untried idea. In business, it is sometimes better to be second.(1651)

How to be a Successful Inventor

Well, you need good timing for a start. You can have a great idea which the public simply doesn't want ... yet. Take the Italian priest, Giovanni Caselli, who invented the first fax machine using an enormous pendulum in the 1860s. Despite the excellent quality of the reproductions, his invention quickly died a commercial death. It was not until the 1980s that the fax

became an essential piece of equipment in every office ...too late for Signor Caselli.

Money also helps. The Frenchman Denis Pap in (1647-1712) had the idea for a steam engine almost a hundred years before the better-remembered Scotsman James Watt was even born ... but he never had enough money to build one.

You also need to be patient (it took scientists nearly eighty years to develop a light bulb which actually worked)... but not too patient. In the 1870s, Elisha Gray, a professional inventor from Chicago, developed plans for a telephone. Gray saw it as no more than 'a beautiful toy', however. . . When he finally sent details of his invention to the Patent Office on February 14th 1876, it was too late; almost identical designs had arrived just two hours earlier ... and the young man who sent them, Alexander Graham Bell, will always be remembered as the inventor of the telephone.

Of course what you really need is a great idea — but if you haven't got one, a walk in the country and a careful look at nature can help. The Swiss scientist, George de Mestral, had the idea, for Velcro when he found his clothes covered in sticky seed pods after a walk in the country. During a similar walk in the Trench countryside some 250 years earlier, Rene- Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur had the idea that paper could be made from wood when he found an abandoned wasps' nest.

You also need good commercial sense. Willy Higinbotham was a scientist doing nuclear research in the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, USA. In 1958 the public were invited to the Laboratory to see their work; but both parents and children were less interested in the complicated equipment and diagrams than in a tiny 120cm screen with a white dot which could be hit back and forth over a 'net' using a button and a knob. Soon hundreds of people were ignoring the other exhibits to play the first ever computer game - made from a simple, laboratory instrument called an 'oscilloscope'.

Higinbotham, however, never made a cent from his invention: he thought people were only interested in the game because the other exhibits were so boring!(2081)

The World of Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola was born in Atlanta on May 8, 1886, when a pharmacist, named Dr. John Styth Pemberton produced the syrup,according to legend, in a brass pot in his backyard. When, by accident or design, carbonated water was added to the syrup, it produced a drink that was declared "delicious and refreshing". The trademark "Coca-Cola" was registered in the U.S. Patent Office on January 31, 1893. Through clever advertising, the demand for the product grew by leaps and bounds. Today the Coca-Cola bottling system is the largest, most widespread production and distribution network in the world.

The international growth of Coca-Cola began in 1900, when a son of the company's founder took a jug of syrup with him on a vacation to England. The same year Coca-Cola traveled to Cuba and Puerto Rico. The first bottling company on the European continent began operation in France in 1920.

Many people outside the United States had their first taste of Coca-Cola during World War II, when 64 bottling plants were set up abroad to provide more that 5 billion bottles of Coke for American service personnel in Europe and the Pacific. In the next 20 years the number of countries with bottling operations nearly doubled.(1026)

CNN

CNN (Cable News Network) is the world's first 24-hour news network. CNN came to existence on June 1, 1980, reaching 1.7 million U.S. households through cable TV. Today, with its headquarters in Atlanta, it is the largest television news-gathering organization in the world, with nine U.S. and 19 international bureaus, reaching 30 million households in more than 130 countries.

Its programming includes live coverage of the world's most important stories as well as in-depth reporting and daily and weekly scheduled programs such as the Week in Review, CNN World Report, The International Hour, The World Today, and Larry King Live.

In 1981 Headline News appeared. Originally known as CNN2, it pioneered news format that included continually updated newscast 24 hours a day. Each 30-minutes segment starts with 13 minutes of top news stories, then continues with a four-minute business news called Dollars and Sense, followed by two minutes of sports and five minutes of human-interest features. This format continues around the clock, allowing viewers to tune in at any time and hear the latest news. The news network is available not just to governments or elite groups of people but to abroad spectrum of the world's population.(1038)


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1557


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