Right now, I am studying political cartoons, also known as editorial cartoons. They were sometimes used to tell messages to people who could not read. A well known political cartoon is Benjamin Franklin's "Join or Die". The different parts of the snake symbolize the thirteen colonies. The meaning of "Join or Die" is that all the colonies have to unite against England or they will all perish. A major political cartoonist was Thomas Nast. He was considered to be the father of American Cartoon. He created many cartoons, and a number of them are very famous, such as the "Brains", as shown. The Harper's Weekly, a magazine, was one of the place's where Nast could show his work. There are still political cartoonists today. An example of a modern day political cartoon is Doonesbury. There is also Edison Lee. Another example of a modern political cartoonist is Jack Ohman. "Revenue Enhancement" is a example of his work. The political cartoons date back very long ago, and still exist today.
The revolutions project revolves (no pun intended) around the industrial revolution and the hight of inventing on a large scale. Some people take the industrial revolution for being all about the invention of mass production, but some extremely important things were invented in this period of time that have nothing to do with large quantities at. Now of course if something is invented, the point is to replicate it and to sell it all over the world, but that is besides the point. One of the most prestigious inventors of this incredible age was Thomas Alva Edison. He is most widely know for inventing the lightbulb, but he had countless other breakthroughs in his lifetime (a total of 1093 patents.)
Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847. He grew up infatuated with science and electricity, so much in fact that his mother forced him to move downstairs because he kept exploding things all around the house. At a very young age, Thomas read the full book, A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy. This book was what fueled most of his experiments in his later life and was such an intense book that he was tossed out of his school for asking to complicated questions that the teacher couldn't answer. (Thomas as a boy below)
Edison had an amazing number of jobs in his youth, the most prevalent problem being that he was always inventing easier ways to do things that corrupted the system of work. He mainly worked for telegraphing companies because he was a whiz at morse code tapping in messages. Most of his patents had to do with things that improved the slow process of telegraphing.
Thomas Edison started his inventing in Newark, New Jersey which would soon become the site for his famous Menlo Park Lab. Edison's first recognizable invention was the telegraph, which was the first device that could successfully record a sound and play it back. This invention started the idea of a telephone which Edison contributed to, though he is usually not recognized for his work in that area. This is the first ever recorded sound.>
Thomas began his work on the lightbulb in his Menlo Park lab and invented the term filament. This is the inside of the lightbulb that actually emits light. Thomas Edison experimented with over 1000 different materials for the filament before finding bamboo which was the first one that actually burned for about 20 minutes. He spent many careful years crafting and perfecting his precious lightbulb and the finished product could burn for as many as 400 hours. When he finished his lightbulb work, he began to produce them and sold them to the Newark city. The people were amazed when the first lights began to color the streets and keep the city from plummeting into darkness at night.
Thomas Alva Edison died on October 18, 1931 and when his funeral was held, the whole world was dark, remembering the man who brought just a little bit more lightness to this world.
