February 11 · This Day in America
He arrives in a small canal town in Ohio, the youngest of seven, a boy a teacher will call addled and a near-deaf student who quits school for good and reads his way through a library instead. He will spend his life refusing to accept that the dark is permanent. From a lab in New Jersey he and his teams produce the phonograph, a practical electric light, a system to carry power into ordinary homes, the motion picture camera — and finally a working world-record of 1,093 patents. He was not a lone genius so much as a man who industrialized invention itself, building the first place whose only product was the future. Most of all he gave Americans something simple and enormous: he made the night optional. A century later we still live inside that decision.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1963
A tall, warbling woman with a bird's nest of confidence stands at a stove on Boston's educational station and shows Americans how to make boeuf bourguignon. She drops things. She laughs. She does not pretend cooking is easy or that she is perfect. The French Chef becomes a phenomenon and television's first cooking star, and a generation learns that joy and ambition belong in the kitchen too.
Source: www.history.com