Topic 7: Life stories

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) once said that her writing could be called poetry only because there was no other name for it. (1)_______________ her poems appear to be extremely compressed essays that happen to be printed in jagged lines on the page. Her subject were (2)_____________: animals, laborers, artists, and the craft of poetry.

Marianne Moore grew up in Kirkwood, Missouri, near St. Lois. After graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1909, she taught commercial subjects at the Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Later she became a librarian in New York City. During the 1920’s she was editor of The Dial, an important literary magazine of the period. She lived quietly all her life, (3)____________ in Brooklyn, New York. She spent a lot of time at the Bronx Zoo, fascinated by animals. Her admiration of the Brooklyn Dodgers-before the team moved to Los Angeles-was widely known. Her first book of poems was published in London in 1921 by a group of friends associated (4)____________ the Imagist movement. From that time on her poetry has been read with interest by succeeding generations of poets and readers. In 1952 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems. She wrote that she did not write poetry for money or fame. To earn a living is needful, but it can be done in routine ways. One writes because one has a (5)_________ desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one’s happiness to express.

(Source: https://goo.gl/Sr1tqX)

Amy Johnson was born in 1903 and grew up in Hull, England. The pioneering British aviator is one of the inspiring female figurehead of the 20th century. After university, Amy got a badly-paid (1)_____managed to save enough money to take flying lessons. She went on to qualify as a pilot, (2)___ receiving her license in 1929. In 1930, (3)_______only flown for seventy-five hours, she persuaded a rich businessperson to give her money to buy a plane, and set off alone for Darwin, Australia, in the hope of breaking the record for flying solo from England to Australia in fourteen days. Amy was the first woman to make this flight, (4) _______ took her nineteen days. She failed to breathe record, but was welcomed home as a hero.

Over the next ten years, Amy made many record-breaking flights. During these years, she was admired for her skill and courage, and she is still fondly remembered as Britain’s first “Queen of the Air”. She is also remembered in many ways, one of which is the British Women Pilot’s Association award - a scholarship to help outstanding women pilots (5)______their careers.

The Nobel Prizes were established by the Swedish inventor, Alfred Bernhard Nobel. Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. (1) ____ his invention brought him much wealth and fame, Nobel realized how destructive dynamite could be. His own brother was (2) ____ in an explosion while working in the laboratory. Nobel thus spent a lot of time and energy promoting world peace to reduce the need to use dynamite in war. He also advocated the settlement of conflicts through diplomatic means.

Before Nobel died, he (3) ____ his money to establish a fund. Every year, the interest from this fund was to be given to the person who has done the most good for mankind in that year. There are (4) ____ in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine and literature. The most prestigious award, however, is the Nobel Peace Prize. This is given to the person who has done the most to promote world peace. One of the most (5) ____ persons to have received the award was Mahatma Gandhi of India.

Alexander Hamilton was born on January 11, 1755 or 1757 in the West Indies. Due to his mother’s lack of marital status, Hamilton was not seen as a legitimate child and was thus denied access to church schools. When his mother died he was adopted by a merchant in Nevis, where he worked as a clerk. During his time in Nevis, Hamilton continued to write; one of his essays impressed the community leaders so much that they worked together and collected funds to send Hamilton to the colonies.

Hamilton served in the revolutionary war, during which time he worked his way through battles and earned himself a place aiding General Washington. After the war, Hamilton was elected into the Congress of the Confederation. He was dissatisfied with the decentralized government that was set up and the inability to raise money from the states to pay the soldiers.

Hamilton was involved in the Constitution Convention but did not fully agree with the document; despite his disagreements, he promoted the document because he believed it was a vast improvement over the Articles of Confederation. He pushed the ratification of the Constitution, teaming up with John Jay and James Madison to write the Federalist papers, which were often cited when pushing for the Constitution’s ratification.

Alexander Hamilton was appointed as the country’s first Secretary of The Treasury on September 11, 1789. During his time as Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton helped write economic policies, develop the funding of state debts, establish the national bank, create a national currency, a system of tariffs, and a peaceful trade relationship with Britain. After his time in politics finished, Alexander Hamilton went back to New York to practice law. He died in a duel with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, New Jersey on July 12, 1804.

(Source: https://poole.ncsu.edu/)

Anna Gomez is a successful TV sports presenter, but most people still think of her as the famous women’s ice-skating champion who won several important competitions when she was younger. “As a child, my dream was actually to become a ballet dancer – I didn’t own any skates until I was nine, and didn’t become really keen on skating until I was fourteen,” says Anna. She went on to university, where, despite ice-skating almost all the time, she left with an excellent degree. “I felt I owed it to my parents. They supported me through university, and expected me to do well there – I didn’t feel I could disappoint them.”

In a sport where most stars become famous as teenagers, Anna was unusual in being in her twenties before she won any major titles. “When I was younger, I got very angry at competitions, shouting at judges if I disagreed with them. That made me unpopular, especially with other skaters. My technique was just as good as theirs and I had a very encouraging coach at the time. The problem was in my head – I just didn’t think I had what it takes to be a champion. That changed as I won more competitions, and I was performing at my best by the age of twenty-five.”

Anna retired from professional ice-skating five years later, having accomplished great success during that period. “It was a difficult decision. As you get near the end of your career, people always ask when you’re going to stop. At the time, I wasn’t sure that I was actually ready to give up. But, looking back, I’m glad I stopped when I did. You shouldn’t think too much about the past – just move on to the next thing.”

Scientist and inventor George Washington Carver was born into slavery during the American Civil War. After the war, he worked diligently to get an education. He managed to get an advanced degree in Botany, which is the study of plants. After he finished his college degree, he worked in the South. He taught people about botany and about how it could be used to improve farming.

Carver learned that there was a problem with cotton farming in the South. Cotton takes nutrients from the soil. If cotton is planted year after year, the quality of the soil decreases. Carver knew that plants like peanuts and sweet potatoes are different from cotton. They add nutrients to the soil rather than take nutrients from the soil. Carver told farmers that it was a bad idea to grow only cotton and no other crops each year. He told them that they should also grow plants like peanuts and sweet potatoes, which improve the quality of the soil. Many farmers followed the advice that Carver offered them. The result was that the production on their farms increased. This increased production of peanuts and sweet potatoes improved the quality of the soil.

However, when production of peanuts and sweet potatoes increased, a new problem developed. The new problem was that there were too much peanuts and sweet potatoes. To solve this problem, Carver began working in a laboratory to find new uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes. He developed hundreds of products that could be made from peanuts and sweet potatoes. These hundreds of products included food products, medicines, plastics and fertilizer.

(Heratsischool.weekly.com/unloads/9/8/0/0/9800425/angl_2.pdf)

Nikola Tesla led an extraordinary life. He is a man who came from nowhere yet became world famous; claimed to be devoted solely to discovery but relished the role of a showman; attracted the attention of many women but never married; and generated ideas that transformed daily life and created multiple fortunes but died nearly penniless.

In the popular imagination, Tesla played the part of a mad scientist. He claimed that he had developed a motor that ran on cosmic rays; that he was working on a new non-Einsteinian physics that would supply a new form of energy; that he had discovered a new technique for photographing thoughts; and that he had developed a new ray, alternately labeled the death ray and the peace ray, with vastly greater military potential than Nobel’s munitions.

His money long gone, Tesla spent his later years moving from place to place, leaving behind unpaid bills. Eventually, he settled in at a New York hotel. Always living alone, he frequented the local park, where he was regularly seen feeding and tending to the pigeons, with which he claimed to share a special affinity. On the morning of Jan. 7, 1943, he was found dead in his room by a hotel maid at age 86.

Today the name Tesla is still very much in circulation. The airport in Belgrade bears his name, as does the world’s best-known electric car, and the magnetic field strength of MRI scanners is measured in Teslas. Tesla was a real-life Prometheus: the mythical Greek titan who raided heaven to bring fire to mankind, yet in punishment was chained to a rock where each day an eagle ate his liver.

(Source: https://theconversation.com/)

In the 1930s, a lot of people in the USA were out of work. Among these people was a man named Alfred Butts. He always had an interest in word games and so, to fill his time, he planned a game which he called “Lexico”. However, he was not completely satisfied with the game, so he made a number of changes to it and, in time, changed its name from “Lexico” to “Alph” and then to “Criss Cross”. He wanted to make some money from his new game but he didn’t have any real commercial success. In 1939, Butts happened to meet a man called Jim Brunot who showed an interest in the new game. The two men worked together on developing the game and in 1948 it was offered for sale in the United States under its new name - “Scrabble”. At first, it didn’t sell very well. In the first year it sold just 2,250 sets and by 1951 it had only reached 8,500 sets a year. Then, in 1952 the manager of Macy’s department store in New York, Jack Strauss, happened to play “Scrabble” while he was on holiday. He thought it was a wonderful game and, when he went back to work after his holiday, he insisted that Macy’s should stock the game and make an effort to call the public’s attention to it. As a result, “Scrabble” became a big success in the United States and it soon spread to Australia and then to other English-speaking countries.

The Broadway hit “Hamilton” earned $1.9 million in ticket sales per week, according to The New York Times. “Hamilton” was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and it won 11 Tony awards out of 16 nominations, according to broadway.com.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, 37, who created the show and starred as Alexander Hamilton, grew up in New York, immersed in music and performance art, although his family could rarely afford Broadway show tickets, according to published biographies. He watched “Les Miserables” at age 7, and fell in love with the art form. He starred in “Pirates of Penzance” during high school, and took a liking to hip-hop and R&B.

Miranda went to Wesleyan University, where he studied theater, appeared on stage and drafted his own work. He was cast as the lead in the 2007 off-Broadway musical “In the Heights,” which eventually went to Broadway in 2008. That show earned four Tony Awards and was nominated for the drama category of the Pulitzer Prize, according to published reports. Miranda was encouraged to be a lawyer at a young age, but he always shined when performing, according to playbill.com. As a young adult, he came to a dilemma that would change his life.

He was substitute teaching at Hunter College High School, his alma mater, and was offered a position as a part-time English teacher there. He was torn between taking the safe job or pursuing writing. Miranda turned to his father and asked, “What should I do? Should I keep teaching or should I just kind of sub and do gigs to pay the rent and really throw myself into writing full time?”

His father answered his question in a letter: “I really want you to keep the job - that’s the smart “parent thing” to do - but when I was 17, I was a manager at Sears in Puerto Rico, and I basically threw it all away to go to New York (and) I didn’t speak a lot of English. It made no sense, but it was what I needed to do. It makes no sense to leave your job to be a writer, but I have to tell you to do it. You have to pursue that if you want." Miranda declined the part-time teaching job, threw himself into writing and “Hamilton!” was born.

(Source: https://www.readingeagle.com/)

Andrew Jackson Beard lived an extraordinary life for a black American inventor. Unlike the vast majority of inventors who never profit from their patents, he profited from his inventions. Andrew Beard was born a slave on a plantation in Woodland, Alabama, in 1849, shortly before slavery ended. He received emancipation at age 15 and he married at age 16. Andrew Beard was a farmer, carpenter, blacksmith, a railroad worker, a businessman and finally an inventor.

He grew apples as a farmer near Birmingham, Alabama for five years before he built and operated a flour mill in Hardwicks, Alabama. His work in agriculture led to tinkering with improvement for plows. In 1881, he patented his first invention, an improvement to the double plow, and sold the patent rights for $4,000 in 1884. His design allowed for the distance between the plow plates to be adjusted. That amount of money would be the equivalent of almost $100,000 today. In 1887, Andrew Beard patented a second plow and sold it for $5,200. This patent was for a design that allowed the pitch of the blades of plows or cultivators to be adjusted. The amount he received would be the equivalent of about $130,000 today.

In 1897, Andrew Beard patented an improvement to railroad car couplers. His improvement came to be called the Jenny Coupler. It was one of many that aimed to improve the knuckle coupler patented by Eli Janney in 1873 (patent US138405). The knuckle coupler did the dangerous job of hooking railroad cars together, which formerly was done by manually placing a pin in a link between the two cars. Beard, himself had lost a leg in a car coupling accident. As an ex-railroad worker, Andrew Beard had the right idea that probably saved countless lives and limbs. Beard received three patents for automatic car couplers. These are US594059 granted November 23, 1897, US624901 granted May 16, 1899, and US807430 granted on May 16, 1904.

While there were thousands of patents filed at the time for car couplers, Andrew Beard received $50,000 for the patent rights to his Jenny coupler. This would be just shy of 1.5 million dollars today. Congress enacted the Federal Safety Appliance Act at that time to enforce using automatic couplers. Andrew Jackson Beard was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006 in recognition of his revolutionary Jenny coupler.

(Source: https://www.transportation.gov/)