Overview

From the preeminent Edison scholar . . . The definitive life of the inventor of the modern age The conventional story is so familiar and reassuring that it has come to read more like American myth than history: With only three months of formal education, a curious and hardworking young man beats the odds and becomes one of the greatest inventors in history. Not only does he invent the phonograph and the first successful electric light bulb, but he also establishes the first electrical power distribution company and lays the technological groundwork for today's movies, telephones, and sound recording industry. Through relentless tinkering, by trial and error, the story goes, Thomas Alva Edison perseveres-and changes the world. In the revelatory Edison: A Life of Invention, author Paul Israel exposes and enriches this one-dimensional view of the solitary ""Wizard of Menlo Park,"" expertly situating his subject within a thoroughly realized portrait of a burgeoning country on the brink of massive change. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of corporate America, and with it the newly overlapping interests of scientific, technological, and industrial cultures. Working against the common perception of Edison as a symbol of a mythic American past where persistence and individuality yielded hard-earned success, Israel demonstrates how Edison's remarkable career was actually very much a product of the inventor's fast-changing era. Edison drew widely from contemporary scientific knowledge and research, and was a crucial figure in the transformation of invention into modern corporate research and collaborative development. Informed by more than five million pages of archival documents, Paul Israel's ambitious life of Edison brightens the unexamined corners of a singularly influential and triumphant career in science. In these pages, history's most prolific inventor-he received an astounding 1,093 U.S. patents-comes to life as never before. Edison is the only biography to cover the whole of Edison's career in invention, including his early, foundational work in telegraphy. Armed with unprecedented access to Edison's workshop diaries, notebooks, and letters, Israel brings fresh insights into how the inventor's creative mind worked. And for the first time, much attention is devoted to his early family life in Ohio and Michigan-where the young Edison honed his entrepreneurial sense and eye for innovation as a newsstand owner and editor of a weekly newspaper-underscoring the inventor's later successes with new resonance and pathos. In recognizing the inventor's legacy as a pivotal figure in the second Industrial Revolution, Israel highlights Edison's creation of the industrial research laboratory, driven by intricately structured teams of researchers. The efficient lab forever changed the previously serendipitous art of workshop invention into something regular, predictable, and very attractive to corporate business leaders. Indeed, Edison's collaborative research model became the prototype upon which today's research firms and think tanks are based. The portrait of Thomas Alva Edison that emerges from this peerless biography is of a man of genius and astounding foresight. It is also a portrait rendered with incredible care, depth, and dimension, rescuing our century's godfather of invention from myth and simplification. Advance Praise for Edison: A Life of Invention ""Familiar Edison stories come alive with fresh insight . . . Israel's scholarship is impeccable while his deceptively easy grace transforms a challenging story into a page turner. One hundred years of history texts have been right all along. Thomas Edison, a protean actor on the American landscape, requires our attention. Paul Israel has given us a book to satisfy that requirement for a long time to come.""- John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Editor, Technology and Culture

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Reviews

As much as any man in history, Thomas Alva Edison changed the fabric of everyday life. Here's a big new biography of the great inventor, by a leading Edison scholar. Israel, managing editor of the Rutgers edition of Edison's papers, takes pains to place the inventor in the context of his times. A good deal of attention is devoted to his early career. The son of Canadian emigrants to northern Ohio, Edison (1847 - 1931) learned to read and write from his schoolteacher mother, rather than from his sporadic formal schooling. His father's books taught him the scientific method and analytical thinking. His first jobs were as a telegrapher, moving from city to city. His desire to master this skilled profession led to his first invention: a device to allow novice telegraphers to vary the speed of a message for practice. Edison's growing body of experimentation was recorded in notebooks he kept as early as 1867, and from which Israel produces numerous drawings and excerpts. By 1869, his search for new telegraphic applications bore fruit in a service delivering financial news to brokerages. Edison quit his job as a telegraph operator to move to New York and concentrate on developing new inventions. There, with a reputation for cleverness and an ability to enlist wealthy backers, he was soon putting in 16-hour days fulfilling new contracts. His insatiable curiosity led him to branch out into fields ranging from metallurgy to plastics to, eventually, the triumphs of the electric light, sound recording, and literally hundreds of other inventions. Israel covers his career in depth, with discussions of technical considerations at the forefront, and frequent reference to Edison's own writings and reported conversation. The inventor's personal life, which he himself put a distant second behind his work, receives the occasional sidelong glance, though it's hard to say that any great new light is shed on it. Exhaustively researched, with a strong emphasis on Edison's methods and achievements. (Kirkus Reviews)

Thomas Alva Edison was, at his death, described as the 'Inventor of the Age', and no wonder, with 1093 US patents and inventions to his name, including the development of the phonograph, the first successful electric lightbulb and the first electrical power distribution company. And yet, many still believe Edison to have been a tinkerer, who achieved his amazing results through simple trial-and-error. However, as Paul Israel shows in this definitive life of Thomas Edison, this perception is very far from the truth. Drawing on over 5 million pages of archival documents, Israel paints a rich portrait of the 'Wizard of Menlo Park', showing him to have been very much a product of his age; a clever, well-read man who studied hard in his younger days, despite little formal schooling, and who succeeded as a result of his studies. Israel also places him firmly in historical context, showing him not as a mythic figure embodying persistence and individuality, but as a man who worked with others to achieve the best results, taking advantage of their expert knowledge and laying the foundations for modern collaborative research. Scholarly and fascinating, this biography is a highly readable and compelling account of one of the most remarkable men of his age. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

PAUL ISRAEL is the Managing Editor of the multivolume documentary edition of the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University and the coauthor of Edison's Electric Light. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey.

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