Edison: A Life of Invention - Hardcover

Israel, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471529427 ISBN 13: 9780471529422

Publisher: Wiley, 1998

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Inside Flap

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

Reviews

Edison's name is on 1,093 U.S. patents--more than any other person's. It is a measure of his renown that his surname alone suffices for the title of this book. Israel, managing editor of the Rutgers University edition of Edison's papers, has explored thoroughly the five million pages of documents housed at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, N.J., and so he is well positioned to discuss the eminent inventor's achievements. That he does with care and clarity. The well-known inventions--the incandescent lightbulb, the phonograph, the kinetoscope for motion pictures, the carbon transmitter for telephones--are all here in detail, and so are the lesser-known ones as well as some Edisonian projects that did not succeed. Israel also paints a clear portrait of the man. One learns, among other things, of Edison's difficult relationships with his children, his indifference to his appearance and his singular notions about diet. (In his last years, when he was suffering from stomach trouble, "he consumed nothing more than a pint of milk every three hours.") Edison may well have been the "Inventor of the age," as he was orotundly described in the Grand Prize that he won at the Universal Exposition of 1878 in Paris, but he was in addition a complex and intriguing human being.

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. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It has been said of Edison that his inventive gifts consisted of 1% genius and 99% hard work. Israel, coauthor of Edison's Electric Light and managing editor of the Thomas Edison Papers (in progress), in effect confirms that assessment. Weighing the competing demands of biographical narrative and technological elucidation, he opts for the latter, showing Edison as tireless experimenter rather than inspired wizard. Israel portrays Edison as an improver of inventions and transformer of concepts into products, someone who applied himself pragmatically to the uses of electricity?from the telegraph and telephone and storage battery to the phonograph, incandescent light and motion picture. Israel shows Edison as a manager of innovation, making the shift from private workshop to corporate research and development with income from royalties. An effective self-publicist, he became in the public mind the central figure of 19th-century invention. He lived, however, into 1931, by which time his brand of empiricism had given way to industrial laboratories on a scale he could not have imagined as a teenage telegrapher in the 1860s. For a flesh-and-blood life one must return to such biographies as Robert Conot's A Streak of Luck (1970) or Neil Baldwin's recent Edison: Inventing the Century. But Israel draws on his subject's notebooks to provide an authoritative look into Edison's working methods, here leavened by enough personal detail to give the achievements shape. When Edison died, the nation extinguished its lights for a minute in tribute. He had not invented either, but he had made electricity work as no one else had. 20 illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The editor of Edison's papers offers the latest biography of the Wizard of Menlo Park. It is not as fluidly readable as Neil Baldwin's Edison: Inventing the Century (1995), because Israel delves into far more detail about Edison's technical work and business dealings, whereas Baldwin dwelt on Edison's personality and strained family life. Readers get a complete rundown of Edison's formative tinkering with telegraphic equipment. Able to invent what businesses, particularly stock brokerages, needed in instantaneous communication, Edison moved to New York, close to where he set up his lab in New Jersey. The 1870s and the 1880s were his most productive years, and although Edison lost out to Alexander Graham Bell in the contest to develop a telephone, he came up with equally revolutionary devices such as the light bulb and the phonograph. Dozens of facsimiles of his original drawings are reproduced, which fortify the impression of Edison's meticulousness, as do Israel's accounts of his business ventures. A complete biography, but a dry one Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0471529427
• ISBN 13: 9780471529422
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560