雙語+MP3|美國學生世界歷史82 產(chǎn)生奇跡的時代

82
The Age of Miracles
產(chǎn)生奇跡的時代

     You may think the Age of Miracles was in Biblical days.
     But if a man who lived at that time should come back to earth now he would think this the Age of Miracles.
     If he heard you talk on a telephone to a person thousands of miles away, or even a hundred feet away, he would think you a magician.
     If you showed him people moving and talking on a movie screen or a television screen, he would think you a witch.
     If he heard you start a band playing by turning on a tape player or a radio, he would think you a devil.
     If he saw you fly through the air in an airplane, he would think you a god.
     We are so used to the telephone, television, and tape recorders, to automobiles and huge trucks and jet planes, to electric lights and moving pictures and radios and marvelous cameras that it is hard to imagine a world in which none of these things existed-absolutely none of these things. Yet in the year 1800, not a single one of these inventions was known.
     Neither George Washington nor Napoleon ever saw an airplane or an automobile. They never used a telephone or a radio or even a bicycle. They never heard of a gasoline engine or a diesel engine or an electric light. They never even imagined men walking on the moon, or close-up photographs of Mars, or television sets, or even typewriters. And as for computers and radar and X-rays-well!
     More wonders have been made in the last hundred years than in all the previous centuries of the world put together.
     A Scotsman named James Watt was one of the first of these magicians whom we call inventors. Watt had watched a boiling kettle on the stove and noticed that the steam lifted the lid. This gave him an idea that steam might lift other things as well as the lid of a teakettle. So he made a machine in which steam lifted a lid called a piston in such a way as to turn a wheel. This was the first steam engine.
     Watt's steam engine moved wheels and other things, but it didn't move itself. An Englishman named Stephenson put Watt's engine on wheels and made the engine move its own wheels. This was the first locomotive. Soon funny-looking carriages drawn by funny-looking engines were made to run on tracks in America. At first these trains ran only a few miles out, from such cities as Baltimore and Philadelphia.
     Then a young fellow named Robert Fulton thought he could make a boat go by putting Watt's engine on board and making it turn paddle wheels. People laughed at him and called the boat he was building Fulton's Folly, which means Fulton's foolishness. But the boat worked, and Fulton had the laugh on those who had laughed at him. He called his boat the Clermont, and it made regular trips up and down the Hudson River.
     No one had ever before been able to talk to another far off until the telegraph was invented. The telegraph makes a clicking sound. Electricity flows through a wire from one place to another place which may be a long distance off. If you press a button at one end of the wire, you stop the electricity flowing through the wire, and the instrument at the other end makes a click. A short click is called a dot, and a long click is called a dash. These dots and dashes stand for letters of the alphabet so you can spell out a message by dots and dashes.

Riverboat with steam-driven paddle wheel （由蒸汽驅(qū)動槳輪的內(nèi)河船）
     A is　　?　　- dot-dash
     B is　　- ???　dash-dot-dot-dot
     E is　　?　　　dot
     H is　　????　　dot-dot-dot-dot
     T is　　-　　dash

     An American painter named Morse invented this wonderful little instrument. He built the first telegraph line in America between Baltimore and Washington, and this was the first message he clicked across it: "What hath God wrought!"
     A schoolteacher named Bell was trying to find some way of making deaf children hear, and in doing so he invented the telephone. The telephone carries words as the telegraph carries clicks. You do not have to know a special alphabet or spell out words by dots and dashes as you do on the telegraph. With the telephone, anyone can talk from one side of the world to the other, and with ships at sea and planes in the air.
     Many inventions now in everyday use have been partly invented by several people, so that it is hard to say just which one thought of the invention first. Several people thought of a way to run a machine by feeding it electricity. This was the electric motor. Then others thought of a way to run a machine by exploding gas. This was the motor used in automobiles.
     Automobiles, as you know, became very popular. At first, people didn't need a license to drive and there were no traffic controls--like stop signs or traffic signals-on the streets. You can imagine some of the problems this caused. An African American named Garrett Morgan invented the three-color traffic signal and patented it in 1923. This helped make the streets safer for cars and for people walking too.
     Electric lights were invented by Thomas Alva Edison. Edison was called a wizard, because in the Middle Ages, wizards were supposed to be able to do and to make all sorts of wonderful and impossible things, to turn lead into gold, to make people invisible, and that sort of thing. But Edison has done things that no wizard of a fairy tale had ever even thought of. Edison was a poor boy who sold newspapers and magazines on a train. He was interested in all sorts of experiments and fitted up a place in the baggage car where he could make experiments. But he made so much of a mess in the car that at last the baggageman kicked Edison's whole outfit off the train. Edison invented many things connected with the phonograph and the movies, and he has probably made more useful and important inventions than any other man who has ever lived, so that he is much greater than those mere kings who have done nothing but quarrel and destroy-without whom the world would have been much better off if they had never lived!
     Thousands of people who lived in the past ages tried to fly and failed. Millions of people have said it was impossible to fly and foolish to try. Some have even said it was wicked to try, that God meant that only birds and angels should fly. At last, after long years of work and thousands of trials, two American brothers named Wright did the impossible. They invented the airplane and, in 1905, the plane flew 24.2 miles in 38 minutes 3 seconds!
     An Italian named Marconi invented the radio, and others every day are still making wonderful inventions, but you will have to read about these yourself, for this book isn't big enough for me to tell you all about them.
     Here is a good subject for an argument or debate: Are we any happier with all these inventions than people were a thousand years ago without them?
     Life is faster and more exciting; but it is more difficult and more dangerous. Instead of singing or playing the violin, or piano, we turn on the stereo or the radio and miss the chief joy in music, the joy of making it ourselves. Instead of the jogging drive in an old buggy behind a horse that goes along through the countryside almost by himself, we speed on in dangerous autos, to which we must pay constant, undivided attention or be wrecked. Instead of pure air, we often have pollution.