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In Thomas Edison, America found its first
ture native-born genius, a man who fulfilled the nation's
dreams about its potential while extravagantly personifying
its cherished values. Imagination, dynamism, entrepreneurial
brillaince -- never before had one of its citizens been
so prodigiously gifted. For Edison himself, these gifts
were nothing less than the means to achieve the spiritual
manifest destiny of the United States. It had fallen to
him, as remarkable an inventor as he was a shrewd businessman,
not only to define the meaning of progress, but then to
chart the path by which he would lead the country toward
it. Abd at the end of that journey lay the technological
revolution of the twentieth century, the birth of the modern
era.
Neil Baldwin's Edison: Inventing the
Century is the first biography of one of the seminal
figures in our history to examine him as both myth and
man, assessing his remarkable accomplishments while taking
throrough measure of the paradoxes of his character. Drawing
upon unprecedented access to Edison family papers and years
of research at the Edison corporate archives, Baldwin offers
a revealing portrait of the inventor, in which we discover
a man whose life epitomized the American dream as fully
as he became a victim of its darker side. From his years
as a fragile boy hawking newspapers on trains throughout
the Midwest to his arrival in New York City as an itinerant
telegrapher seeking his fortune; from his development of
the light bulb to his spectacular electrification of lower
Manhattan; from his struggles to create the phonograph and
motion picture and bring them to market to his obsessive
search for a source of natural rubber even as he was dying,
Edison: Inventing the Century is an enthralling chronicle
of the most revered figure of hsi time.
Alongside the esteemed scientist stands
the fiercely self-aggrandizing manufacturer of his own myth,
the man possessed by a virtually incessant flow of ideas,
who often fights brutally to protect those ideas in the
marketplace, the man who publicly preaches the values of
home life while his own family is plagued by clinical depression
and alcoholism, and while his six neglected, aimless children
from two marriages try to step from his massive shadow,
yet prove, almost inevitably, to be a disappointment.
Reaching across mid-nineteenth-century pastoral
America to the epochal upheavals of the Industrial Age,
from dim, disheveled laboratories in Menlo Park where the
incandescent light was perfected to dazzling electrical
lighting displays in Paris, Edison: Inventing the Century
compellingly recounts the greatest saga of success and ingenuity
in our history, the story of a singular genius who threw
off the shackles of the past to become, as a New York
Times poll of the time named him, "The Greatest
Living American."
A native New Yorker, Neil Baldwin received
his Ph.D. in Modern American Poetry from SUNY/Buffalo. He
is the author of critically acclaimed biographies of William
Carlos Williams and Man Ray. He lives in Upper Montclair,
New Jersey, with his wife and two children.
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