Edison

Review by Choice Review

For millennia, people relied on firewood, candles, and kerosene for light, until Thomas Alva Edison introduced electric light, and then homes and streets became bright with incandescent lamps. This much is common knowledge, but few may know that Edison was no ordinary inventor. Like gifted poets drafting epic poems or prolific composers creating countless pieces of music, he made scores of inventions that now play indispensable roles in the modern world. In this exhaustive account, Morris, a well-known biographer, draws on numerous archival resources, many from Edison's own laboratory, to convey a well-rounded portrait of this genius who was nearly deaf, covering his childhood and family, his conflicts, and his companies, as well as reactions to him. As Morris recounts, some scientists saw Edison as a money-making inventor and were reluctant to accept him into the National Academy of Sciences. A French science-fiction writer, meanwhile, thought this "Wizard of Menlo Park" would create new synthetic human beings. These and many other fascinating tidbits are included in this must-read volume about the great inventor, whose obsession with recording technology paved the way for modern-day sound and video recordings. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. --Varadaraja V. Raman, emeritus, Rochester Institute of Technology

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

Morris (Colonel Roosevelt, 2010) takes a risk with his new biography of Thomas Edison he runs the inventor's life backwards like a film in reverse, finding fresh truths in the story of a genius of almost metaphysical proportions. Edison seems to have almost singlehandedly ushered in the modern age, with his breakthroughs in the recording of sound (the phonograph), lighting (the incandescent lightbulb), moviemaking, and electric generation and communications. Morris shows that besides an immense intellect and ability to survive on little sleep, two aspects of the inventor's makeup were key. To Edison, failure was good: he typically regarded every failure as a step towards success, Morris writes. And his almost total deafness wrapped Edison in his own cocoon: I live in a great, moving world of my own, Edison wrote. He was a man capable of great kindness, but oblivious to the feelings of family and friends; a wealthy man heedless of the demands of his creditors and investors. This absorbing biography, Morris' last (he died in May 2019), has flaws, notably an excess of scientific and engineering detail. Its life-story-told-backwards technique demands attention, but at the end the reader sees Edison fully revealed, a small child about to transform the world.--Mary Ann Gwinn Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Inspiration and perspiration prodigiously unite in this sweeping biography of one of America's greatest inventors. Pulitzer-winning biographer Morris (Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan) tells Thomas Alva Edison's story backward, opening with the creator of the first long-lasting light bulb, the phonograph, and other electromechanical marvels in lionized, imperious old age and presenting each decade of his life in reverse order, back to his boyhood spells of intense, isolated concentration. The ordering is something of a gimmick--the book reads nicely back to front--but along the way Morris vividly fleshes out Edison's extraordinary intellect and industry as he devoured stacks of scientific treatises, incessantly brainstormed ideas with complex, elegant diagrams, and spent a lifetime of 18-hour days perfecting his designs in the laboratory, where he ate and slept on the floor. (His paternal absenteeism, Morris notes, got a tragicomic comeuppance from two resentful wastrel sons who exploited his name to perpetrate frauds.) Writing in amusing, literate prose that's briskly paced despite a mountain of fascinating detail, Morris sets Edison's achievements against a colorful portrait of his splendid eccentricity--mostly deaf, he was given to biting phonographs and pianos to divine their acoustics--whose visionary obsessions drove his businesses near to bankruptcy. The result is an engrossing study of a larger-than-life figure who embodied a heroic age of technology. Photos. (Oct.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

In his last piece of scholarship, the late award-winning author Morris (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt) hones in on one of the world's greatest inventors: Thomas Edison (1847--1931). Anyone expecting a straightforward biography, from cradle to grave, is implored to look elsewhere, perhaps to Matthew Josephson's often-cited Edison: A Biography. This work by Morris follows Edison's life backward by decade in chapters titled after his subject's passions, such as "Magnetism," "Light," and "Sound." Morris presents Edison's life in such detail, it's as if readers are with him in his laboratory or trying out a new invention. The author reviewed millions of pages of archives and had access to Edison's family papers, to produce more than 100 pages of endnote citations. What results is the magnum opus for a biographer who always looked at his subjects from unique angles. From his showmanship to his scientific imagination, Edison is captured in a supremely intimate way. VERDICT This biography is the new standard for scholarship on the Wizard of Menlo Park and is a work that will long sustain Morris's legacy. [See Prepub Alert, 4/15/19.]--Keith Klang, Port Washington P.L., NY

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

One of history's most prolific inventors receives his due from one of the world's greatest biographers.Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Morris (This Living Hand and Other Essays, 2012, etc.), who died this year, agrees that Thomas Edison (1847-1931) almost certainly said, "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration," and few readers of this outstanding biography will doubt that he was the quintessential workaholic. Raised in a middle-class Michigan family, Edison displayed an obsessive entrepreneurial spirit from childhood. As an adolescent, he ran a thriving business selling food and newspapers on a local railroad. Learning Morse code, he spent the Civil War as a telegrapher, impressing colleagues with his speed and superiors with his ability to improve the equipment. In 1870, he opened his own shop to produce inventions to order. By 1876, he had money to build a large laboratory in New Jersey, possibly the world's first industrial research facility. Never a loner, Edison hired talented people to assist him. The dazzling results included the first commercially successful light bulb for which, Morris reminds readers, he invented the entire system: dynamo, wires, transformers, connections, and switches. Critics proclaim that Edison's innovations (motion pictures, fluoroscope, rechargeable batteries, mimeograph, etc.) were merely improvements on others' work, but this is mostly a matter of sour grapes. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone was a clunky, short-range device until it added Edison's carbon microphone. And his phonograph flabbergasted everyone. Humans had been making images long before Daguerre, but no one had ever reproduced sound. Morris rivetingly describes the personalities, business details, and practical uses of Edison's inventions as well as the massive technical details of years of research and trial and error for both his triumphs and his failures. For no obvious reason, the author writes in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1920, with each of the seven following chapters backtracking a decade. It may not satisfy all readers, but it works.Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 At seventy-three, with his wartime career as president of the Naval Consulting Board behind him, Edison tried to make sense of a new intellectual order that challenged everything he had learned of Newtonian theory. Abstract thought did not come easily to him. "My line of sorrow," he wrote, "lies in the realm of technical science." He needed to feel things come together under his hands, see the filament glow, smell the carbolic acid, and--as far as possible for a near-deaf man--hear the "molecular concussions" of music.1 Laws such as those of Faraday's electromagnetic induction and Ohm's relation of current, voltage, and resistance he understood, having applied them himself in the laboratory. But now, if only to slow as much as possible the entropy of his own particles (the fate of all systems, according to Lord Kelvin), Edison studied Einstein's general theory of relativity.2 The recent solar eclipse had persuaded him, along with the academic scientists he mocked as "the bulge-headed fraternity," that the theory was valid--even if it failed to suggest any correlation between his attempt to measure the total eclipse of 1878 and his subsequent perfection of incandescent electric light.3 The urtext of the theory, as translated by Robert Lawson, defeated him after only eleven pages. "Einstein like every other mathematical mind," he scrawled in the margin of his copy, "has not the slightest capacity to impart to the lay mind even an inkling of the subject he tries to explain." He turned for help to an interpretive essay--Georges de Bothezat's "The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Glance into the Nature of the Question"--and filled thirty-one notebook pages with scrawled paraphrases of its main points.4 Gravitation is due to the retardation in velocity of the ultimate particle in passing through the fixed aggregates of matter. Ultimate particles fill the whole of space and proceed in every direction. . . . He could imagine that at least in terms of his own observation, forty years before, of the thermionic emission of carbon electrons in a lightbulb after evacuation--a mysterious darkening since known as the "Edison Effect." It was about as far as he ever got in his search for a "new force" in electrochemistry. Disparaged at the time by his peers, he now knew that he had discovered, if not recognized, the phenomenon of radio waves eight years before Heinrich Hertz. Wireless waves cannot proceed thru space but thru Matter in combination with the ultimate particle. . . . From this, if true, all matter is formed of the same material. Edison had once teased a science fiction writer with the notion of interchanging atoms of himself with those of a rose. He noted that Einstein envisaged particles in space with common axes converging into solidly constituted "rings," while others remained ethereal. Hence the "primal ring" of the solar system, with its interplanetary nothingness. We now have matter in a form which is polar & capable of producing what we call Magnetism & Electricity. The religion boys, of course, would protest that what drew particles together was the will of God. Edison was as ready as Einstein to believe in a "Supreme Intelligence" made manifest by the order and beauty of the stars, and equally reluctant to personalize it: "I cannot conceive such a thing as a spirit." The furthest he would go in the direction of metaphysics was to imagine the subcellular particles of a human being as "infinitesimally small individuals, each itself a unit of life."5 These units work in squads--or swarms, as I prefer to call them--and . . . ​live for ever. When we "die" these swarms of units, like a swarm of bees, so to speak, betake themselves elsewhere and go on functioning in some other form or environment. If the units of life which compose an individual's memory hold together after that individual's death, is it not within the range of possibility . . . ​that these memory swarms could retain what we call the individual's personality after the dissolution of the body? Having thus anticipated by more than a century both swarm intelligence and DNA inheritance theory, Edison gave up trying to understand relativity and returned to the more tangible universe he preferred. A Big Bump for Cookies As he saw it, his first order of business in the new decade was to reimpose his own--highly individual--personality upon Thomas A. Edison, Inc., the sprawling industrial conglomerate that he had been forced to neglect during the war. He chose not to notice that it had thereby done much better than it had in earlier years, when he had run its manifold activities--phonograph and record production, movie making, cement milling, storage battery development, and laboratory research--with such autocratic willfulness as to make his executives despair of ever influencing him. Edison was not an easy man to advise, being a combination of twinkling charm and bruising imperiousness. In his youth the charm had prevailed, but now that he was a septuagenarian and almost unreachably deaf, the urge to overbear had become a compulsion, and he had lost much of the bonhomie that had kept thousands of men working for him, and worshiping him, over the past half-century. Long gone was the perpetual hint of a smile flickering around the corners of his mouth, as if he were about to break into thigh-slapping laughter. The artist Richard Outcault remembered its radiance back in '89, when "the boys" presented "the Old Man" with a gold and silver phonograph for his birthday. "Edison's smile! [It] sweetened up the atmosphere of the whole building. . . . As long as I live the sweet spirit that pervaded the atmosphere of the laboratory will always remain with me."6 Edison still moved with the jerky energy that kept him awake, and acting more decisively, than young men unable to match his eighteen-hour-a-day schedule. He regarded exercise as a waste of time, and sleep even more so. Since he was twenty, he had maintained his 175-pound, five-foot-nine-and-a-half-inch frame with only a few lapses, quickly corrected. ("I do believe I have a big bump for cookies.") The most remarkable thing about his appearance, apart from the brilliance of the blue-gray eyes, was the largeness of his head, amplified by its thick mop of snowy hair. He wore custom-made size eight-and-a-half straw hats, and slashed the bands of his caps for comfort. His handshake was perfunctory and surprisingly cold. Monomaniacally focused on whatever current project interested him, he strode at a forward angle, hands in vest pockets, aware only of his destination and completely unconscious of time. He never wore a watch, and made no distinction between day and night, nodding off when he felt like it and expecting his assistants to follow suit. The same went for waking up. If two hours of rest was enough for him, he did not see why anyone else should want more.7 Lovable as he was--or had been in the past--Edison did not return affection, beyond the occasional beaming familiarity, in which there was often a note of tease. He thought hurtful practical jokes--electrified washbasins, a wad of chewing tobacco spat onto a white summer suit, firecrackers tossed at the bare feet of children--were funny. Having made money easily all his life, thanks to phenomenal energy and the mysterious gift of imagination (his personal wealth, at latest calculation, was almost $10 million), he was unmoved by the lesser luck or ill fortune of others, and casual about the loneliness of his wives. Now, returning to his laboratory desk in 1920, he was determined to teach Charles Edison a thing or two about running a large corporation. Excerpted from Edison by Edmund Morris All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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