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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.
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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