自考英语综合二下册课文 lesson 15

　　[00:00.00]Lesson Fifteen   Text

[00:05.30]Edison: Inventor of Invention Walter Lippmann

[00:12.56]It is impossible to measure the importance of Edison

[00:17.92]by adding up the specific inventions with which his name is associated.

[00:23.67]Far-reaching as many of them have been in their effect upon modern civilization,

[00:30.62]the total effect of Edison's career surpasses the sum of all of them.

[00:37.38]He did not merely make the incandescent 1 lamp

[00:42.34]and the phonograph and innumerable other devices practicable for general use;

[00:50.99]it was given to him to demonstrate the power of applied 2 science so concretely,

[00:57.65]so understandably, so convincingly that he altered the mentality 3 of mankind.

[01:06.12]In his lifetime,largely because of his successes,

[01:11.47]there came into widest acceptance the revolutionary conception

[01:18.03]that man could by the use of his intelligence

[01:24.19]invent a new mode of living on this planet;

[01:29.34]the human spirit,

[01:32.60]which in all previous ages had regarded the conditions of lifeas

[01:38.77]essentially unchanging and beyond man's control, confidently,

[01:46.63]and perhaps somewhat naively 4,

[01:51.31]adopted the conviction that anything

[01:55.96]could be changed and everything could be controlled.

[02:01.31]This idea of progress is in the scale of history a very new idea.

[02:07.87]It seems first to have taken possession

[02:12.31]of a few minds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

[02:18.16]as an accompaniment of the great advances in pure science.

[02:24.82]It gained greater currency in the first half of the nineteenth century

[02:31.20]when industrial civilization

[02:35.14]began to be transformed by the application of steam power.

[02:41.10]Edison supplied the homely 5 demonstrations 6 which insured

[02:47.16]the popular acceptance of science,

[02:52.02]and clinched 7 the popular argument,which had begun with Darwin,

[02:58.26]about the place of science in man's outlook upon life.

[03:04.50]Thus he became the supreme 8 propagandist of science

[03:11.06]and his name the great symbol of an almost blind faith in its possibilities.

[03:18.92]Thirty years ago, when I was a schoolboy,

[03:23.57]the ancient conservatism of manwas still the normal inheritance of every child.

[03:31.62]Perhaps these things would work. Perhaps they would not explode.

[03:38.98]Perhaps it would be amusing to play with them.

[03:44.44]Today every schoolboy not only takes all the existing inventions

[03:51.81]as much for granted as we took horses and dogs for granted,

[03:57.69]but also he is entirely 9 convinced that all other desirable things

[04:05.45]can and will be invented.

[04:09.10]In my youth the lonely inventor

[04:13.54]who could not obtain a hearing was still the stock figure of the imagination.

[04:20.41]Today the only people who are not absolutely sure

[04:25.87]that television is perfected are the inventors themselves.

[04:32.22]No other person played so great a part as Edison

[04:37.50]in this change in human expectation,and finally,

[04:43.45]by the cumulative 10 effect of his widely distributed inventions

[04:50.51]plus a combination of the modern publicity 11 technique

[04:57.04]and the ancient myth-making faculty 12 of men,

[05:02.11]he was lifted in the popular imagination to a place

[05:08.04]where he was looked upon not only as the symbol but as the creator of a new age.

[05:16.08]In strict truth an invention is almost never the sole product of any one mind.

[05:23.74]The actual inventor is almost invariably

[05:29.20]the man who succeeds in combining and perfecting previous discoveries

[05:36.46]insuch a way as to make them convenient

[05:43.01]Edison had a peculiar 13 genius for carrying existing discoveries

[05:49.68]to the point where they could be converted into practicable devices,

[05:56.52]and it would be no service to his memory,

[06:01.06]or to the cause of sciencewhich he serves so splendidly,

[06:06.92]to pretend that he invented by performing solitary 14 miracles.

[06:12.87]The light which was bom in his Laboratory at Menlo Park fifty-two years ago

　　[06:20.03]was conceived in the antecedent experiments of many men in many countries

[06:27.58]over a period of nearly forty years,

[06:32.02]and these experiments in their turn were conceivable

[06:36.98]only because of the progress of the mathematical

[06:43.96]and physical sciencesin the preceding two centuries.

[06:48.22]Because of Edison,more than of any other man,

[06:53.68]scientific research has an established place in our society;

[07:00.44]because of the demonstrations he made,

[07:04.70]the money of taxpayers 15 and stockholders has become available for studies

[07:12.07]the nature of which they do not often understand,

[07:17.24]though they appreciate their value

[07:21.08]and anticipate their ultimate pecuniary 16 benefits.

[07:26.64]It would be a shallow kind of optimism

[07:31.00]to assume that the introduction of the art of inventing

[07:36.78]has been an immediateand unmixed blessing 17 to mankind.

[07:42.84]It is rather the most disturbing element in civilization,

[07:48.30]the most profoundly revolutionary thing which has evei let loose in the world.

[07:55.85]For the whole ancient wisdom of man is founded upon the conception of a life

[08:03.29]which in its fundamentals chi imperceptibly if at all.

[08:10.34]The effect of organized,subsidized inven

[08:15.91]stimulated by tremendous incentives 18 of profit,

[08:21.55]and encouraged by an insatiable popular appetite for change,

[08:27.92]is to set all the relation men in violent motion,

[08:33.78]and to create overpowering problems faster than human wisdom

[08:39.84]has as yet been able to assimilate them.

[08:44.51]Thus the age we live in offers little prospect 19 of outward stability,

[08:51.07]and only those who by an inner serenity 20

[08:56.42]and disentanglement

[09:00.19]have learned how to deal with the continually unexpected can be at home in it.

[09:07.55]It maybe rhat in time we shall become used to change

[09:13.61]as in our older wisd we had become used to the unchanging.