Fleet Fire: Thomas Edison and the Pioneers of theElectric Rev olution - Hardcover

Davis, L J

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559706554 ISBN 13: 9781559706551

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 2003

Synopsis

An engaging and informative narrative chronicles the scientists, inventors, scientific research, and technological advances that fueled the development of electricity and explores the remarkable influence of Edison, Davenport, Morse, Cyrus Field, and others on today's modern high-tech world. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

L. J. Davis is the author of three novels and four works of nonfiction. He contributes to a wide range of periodicals including Mother Jones, Harpers, and The Daily Deal. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of a National Magazine Award. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Reviews

Ben Franklin abandoned his research in the 1750s when he could find no practical uses for electricity. Yet Davis places him first in the succession of American entrepreneurial inventors who created the electric revolution. Skipping ahead to the mid-19th century, Davis follows the adventures of the blacksmith Thomas Davenport and his electric motor, the painter Samuel Morse and his inspiration for the electromagnetic telegraph, and the businessman Cyrus Field and the transatlantic cable. He devotes a third of the book to Thomas Edison and his rivals, who together made electricity a household technology in the 1880s. According to Davis, the revolution's first surge ended around 1900 as Guglielmo Marconi perfected wireless (i.e., radio) telegraphy and Reginald Aubrey Fessenden made the first voice broadcast. By juxtaposing the famous with the obscure, Davis shows that success depended upon an aptitude for business as well as mechanical genius. The winners in this story care less about understanding scientific principles than about figuring out how to make their inventions pay. A contributor to Harper's and other magazines, Davis (The Billionaire Shell Game) emphasizes the most astonishing anecdotes and eccentric characters, showing little regard for their historical significance. His best narratives, judging from the footnotes, derive from dated biographies; and he frequently interrupts himself with declamations about the lone inventor and the pace of progress. Patchy and distorted as it is, however, this account colorfully portrays the chaotic nature of the electric revolution and the men who made it happen. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Benjamin Franklin to Reginald Fessenden (a forgotten radio pioneer), this jaunty narrative regales readers with tales of the thinkers, tinkers, and tycoons who fiddled with electricity and made it profitable. Davis is both irreverent and serious--a tonal discontinuity that somehow works. The same could be said of the devices dreamed up by Davis' colorful gallery of characters; nobody really knew what electricity was, though a few, such as Franklin, Galvani, and Volta, delved into it through experimentation. Yet they got their nineteenth-century gadgets to function, somehow, through trial and error. Thomas Edison was the apotheosis of this haphazard method, and Davis has great sport dinging the icon's foibles and his bad head for business. Davis enlivens this factually steady history with the engaging flair of a novelist. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1559706554
• ISBN 13: 9781559706551
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 358