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III. Discuss the following questions in pairs.
1. Why did Birdseye's first company go bankrupt?
2. Who discovered that aspirin is a painkiller?
3. Why did Armstrong kill himself?
4. What is the biggest problem of successful inventions?
5. Why do you think many inventors are not good
businessmen?
Text 6
How to be a Successful Inventor
I. You are going to read an article about important
inventions.
• Draw a line if there is any connection between these
words.
Paper factory Alexander Graham Bell
Velcro James Watt
Fax machine wasps’ nest
Telephone Giovanni Caselli
Steam engine seed pods
II. Read the text again and see if you guessed correctly.
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'.
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