VOA常速英语:托马斯.爱迪生遗址震撼公园旅人

Thomas Alva Edison is considered America’s greatest inventor.He’s best known for creating the first long-lasting electric lightbulb in 1879.But he also invented -- and perfected -- more than 1,000 other products.

His favorite, historians say, was the phonograph, the first machine that could capture sound and play it back.

His 1888 recording is believed to be the earliest existing recording of Thomas Edison’s voice.

Edison was also one of the first inventors of the motion picture camera.

“I’m here at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey,right behind me is a three-story lab that helped produce some of Edison’s most famous inventions.”

National parks traveler Mikah Meyer spent a day immersing himself in Edison history at the inventor’s home and laboratory.

“It’s a fitting place to take a video on a cell phone.Because if it wasn’t for Edison’s invention, this phone and the electricity that charges it wouldn’t exist.”

Much of the site has been kept intact.

“They had this amazing library there that kept all his records,and then you live right next door in the factory, everything was in-house.So they were designing, they were building, they were shipping, all from this one location.”

With 400,000 artifacts and over five million pages of documents,the site looks very much as it did when Edison was working here.

Also on the property is The Black Maria,considered to be the world’s first building constructed solely for the production of movies.

“It was designed on a pivot-and-turn system so that it could capture the direct sunlight as easily as possible to make the films.”

Edison’s early attempts at movie-making helped set the stage for the remarkable achievements that have been made in film-making since then,and made possible just about every form of digital media that permeates modern culture today.

Julie Taboh, VOA news, Washington.