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Edison: A Biography

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Written 45 years ago, this biography is still the best we have on the great inventor. Josephson focuses as much on Edison's work as he does on the man, and the book can be somewhat technical at times. It is natural to compare it to Neil Baldwin's EDISON: INVENTING THE CENTURY, written in 1995, and Josephson's Edison is much more solid than Baldwin's. Baldwin sacrifices the inventions while dealing mainly with the man; Josephson is much more rounded and deals with all aspects of Edison's life. Highly recommended.

I had been looking for something to get me past the grade school biographies that I remember reading about Edison -- this is the best biography of the inventor that I have read. Not only does it dispell many of the myths surrounding Edison (he didn't come up with the idea for the incandesent lamp; he was not made deaf by a conductor chastising him for a fire with his chemistry set), but it highlights his major work not in individual inventions, but in combining his inventions into systems ... that were both practical and profitable.

The book is very readable, and goes into just enough depth about his personal life (of which he had very little) and his public and professional lives. The only negative is that because it was written in the early 1950's, it is missing a perspective that could be added by 50 more years of luxuriating in the lifestyle which Edison has made possible.

"It's still burning" was the phrase repeated as the light bulb stayed lit longer and longer. The same phrase was used by Edison's son to keep the death-vigil crowds informed as the great man lay dying, as relayed by this author. Unlike the Edison method of great volumes of empirical data patiently sifted down in huge experiments, the author deftly moves in and out of topics in a refreshingly constrained manner, which he really has to do to keep his book medium-length and still cover a lot.

The middle to the end of the book explores some very important themes, where there are irreconcilable problems with some of Edison's later inventions and the marketability of the resulting products. Like the ore-smashing enterprise in New Jersey, which worked, but not at a market profit. Same thing with the goldenrod-into-rubber operation in Florida.

These then become background for some surprisingly sensitive observations on Edison, made by his friends John Burroughs and Henry Ford. Ford is too sentimental to shut down the funding of the hopeless goldenrod operation; and Burroughs gently points out how Edison in his later years at least, contradicted his personal core-beliefs about sleeping and eating food (He sleeps till 10 am, "bolts half a pie," dumps tons of sugar in his coffee, then lectures on how Americans should eat less and sleep less).

The disconnect which also developed between Edison and his children is developed against the backdrop of Edison's inability to relate to the scale and demands of the electric power industry which he helped create. At his core, as the author shows, Edison's ability to do things was not necessarily transferable to others, including his children. The first batch of kids went kind of bad, and the group from marriage #2 turned out better because wife #2 was more strict and traditional than Edison.

Harvard Business Review recently had an article on great leaders, and pointed out that for every narcissistic leader, you need about 100 obsessive-compulsives scurrying around to make things really work. Each type needs the other to get anything done. This seems to have been the case with Edison, who in addition to being headstrong and creative, had the essential gifts described by Henry Ford as necessary to get anything done: also have "the soul of an Irish construction foreman and a Jewish broker." Or something like that.

This was an awesome book! Very well written and keeps you interested. I read it in a week and would recomend it to anyone. Matthew Josephson is an excellent writer who gives a wonderful account of Edison's life and his character.

The life story of Edison is just amazing. The challenges that he had to overcome where incredible. His persistance to keep trying and never give up is one of the many great lessons we can learn from his life that are in this book. Absolutly one of the best biographies I have read. His struggles over electricity and what brought him into partnership with JP Morgan are very interesting. The mistakes that he made are also detailed here so the reader can see the full scope of Edison's life. This book also covers the business aspects of Edison and all of his major inventions.

This book shows the great triumph that one can attain when believing that one can make their dreams a reality with some hard work and persistance.

This is really a fantastic book. It's extremely well-written. From what I've seen, it's by far the best, most readable Edison biography. The author does a very good job of cutting through the legends and rumors to report accurate facts... always in such an inviting manner that it's very hard to close the book and take a break from reading. Buy it, you won't be disappointed. I'd give it six stars if I could.

In the December 2006 Atlantic magazine, there was a list of the 100 most influential Americans in history. Nine of the top ten were political figures: Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, FDR, Hamilton, Franklin, John Marshall, Martin Luther King (not a politician, but involved with political movements) and Woodrow Wilson. The tenth person, ranked number nine on the list, was Thomas Edison. Reading Matthew Josephson's biography of Edison, you might feel that there is a good argument to raise him even higher. On the other hand, an argument could be made that he should drop a bit too.

In many ways, Edison personified the American dream. With little formal education, little money and a hearing impairment, he was able to become wealthy and one of the most admired people in the country (and throughout the world). He played a pivotal role in modernizing the United States through electronics.

Although it may seem a tautology, Edison proved that to be a good inventor, you need to be inventive. From an early age, he was constantly tinkering and developing new ways to do things. At first, his jobs with telegraph companies led him to create new methods to speed up his work. Eventually, he would move on to other things, most notably the phonograph, the motion picture and most importantly, the light bulb.

To some extent (and this is why some would drop him lower on the Influentials list), it is exaggeration to fully credit Edison with these inventions. Most of his work was done with people working under him. In addition, other people were also developing similar devices, so even if he had not been around, chances are we would still have had these devices in roughly the same era. (Contrast this with political figures who definitely alter the course of history; the U.S. would be a much different place if someone other than Washington was our first president or if someone besides Lincoln had served during the Civil War.)

But such an argument also sells Edison short. First of all, he may have not done all the work himself (in particular, he hated the theoretical side of things), but he provided both the vision and the leadership. With the light bulb - probably his greatest invention - he (unlike his competitors) thought beyond the device itself and saw how it would fit into an electronic infrastructure. Even in the late 1800s, the era of the true solo inventor was over, but Edison knew how to build a team that would do the inventing together.

As Josephson points out, Edison also had his negative points. As a family man, he was lacking, often ignoring his wife and children for long periods of time when he was consumed with his work. He could also be exceedingly stubborn, which would sometimes lead him from seeing the right way of doing things; the best example of this deals with his failure to acknowledge that alternating current was superior to direct current in creating an electric network.

At almost five hundred pages (plus an index), this book provides as much details about Edison's life as almost anyone would require. Josephson is a good, readable biographer who has obvious affection for his subject, but doesn't let this taint his objectivity. Where Edison fits on your own "most influential" list is a matter of opinion, but this book will help you make that an informed opinion.

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How re-affirming it is, is it not, when one comes to the biography of a man like this, and we find out his great afflictions and handicaps, and see the unbelievable heights he arose to in spite of these! Simply Inspiring, for sure.

Of late (last 10 years, roughly) I have been on a great "feeding" of history and historical stuff...I hated it in school, and now, I simply cannot get my fill of ALL things historical, especially of the biographical nature...I have spoken with others, and they tell me the same thing in many cases. What is this, that we, apparently with age, wish to come to know more about those that came before us??? If anyone has ideas or suggestions, I certainly would appreciate their contacting me and letting me know.

I read this book (just finished, actually) in a special reprinted edition from History Book Club, which I bought last winter. I must say that I was simply blown away to actually read all the accomplishments of this Great Great Man, and not just the "verbally-quipped stuff", that of the "legends" and the "stories", but the true, hard-copy, black and white, sweat and toil, frustrating, but to him infinately fascinating and challenging quests to solve "the problem" at hand at any given moment in his long and certainly illustrious career.

And, of course, to see the integrity of the man, also behind the "legend". No crooked, attention-getting theatrics from this down-home, quiet spoken, simple man...by that I do not mean simple minded, but the every-day man that he was. To see the way this man began to plan the invention of the electric light, not with an end-result (the light), but with the planning of the system that would have to deliver the power to it, based on something he knew about first hand (where NOBODY before him had gone, and thus, failed), the trunk-lines of the telegraph, and the delivery system of natural gas for the gas lights that were in use at that time. This, truly, is amazing, breath-taking stuff...a kind of thinking that is truly rarely seen, maybe once in a hundred or two hundred years.

And, later, the phonograph, his many episodes of "losing it all" and "building it up again", the motion picture, how many things he had "invented" or "discovered" while trying to do something else, some, not realizing their unbelievable potential. This book is simply one of the most fascinating reads I have had in a very long time.

I could go on, but that would lead me to telling you the whole book, because it is so great, and that would defeat the purpose of this review. I heartily suggest, if you are interested in "How" and "Why" things are, today, the way they are, and work the way they do, that you check out this great biography, about one of the Chief Reasons for our current world of wonderful, electrical appliances, illumination(s), audio/visual toys, etc. If ever there was a Man who Changed the World, this little deaf man, Edison, certainly was the leader of them All! ~operabruin

I had wanted to read a biography of Thomas Edison for a long time and put a bit of effort into finding the right one. There are several more recently published books on the market, but I found that Matthew Josephson's 1959 classic was the consensus pick as the "definitive" single volume life of the "Wizard." I'm glad I did the research as "Edison" is simply phenomenal, perhaps one of the 10 best biographies I've ever read. I can't understand how Josephson didn't win the Pulitzer Prize for the effort.

Edison is a colossal character and Josephson captures his life and times brilliantly. The narrative is expertly structured with a perfect blend of the personal, the scientific, and the industrial strands that made up his life. Each chapter is tight and fluid; each theme well developed and clear.

Having spent the past decade of my professional life in Silicon Valley, I found many parallels between Edison's era and our own.

To begin with, Edison was a practical inventor, rather than a theorist or academic - and proudly so. Today, PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel is encouraging bright young Americans to forego college in favor of unleashing their creative talents before they are corrupted by higher education. It's a sentiment Thomas Edison would certainly have endorsed. In Edison's famous words: "Do you think I'd have amounted to anything if I went to school?" For all of his bluster against academics, however, it's notable that Edison consistently employed some of the best educated scientists in their field in his research facilities.

Perhaps more than anything, Edison introduced the concept of commercial scientific discovery; the quest to unlock the secrets of nature in the pure pursuit of profits. Again, in Edison's words: "I'm not a scientist. I'm an inventor...I measure everything I do by the size of the silver dollar. If it don't come up to that standard then I know it's no good." Despite that professed capitalist focus, many (perhaps most) of Edison's commercial enterprises were woefully managed, the Edison General Electric Company (more accurately under the leadership of Henry Villard) offers a dramatic case in point, where the much smaller Thomson-Houston Company, ably led by Charles A. Coffin, consolidated the industry to create the modern corporate juggernaut we know as GE.

The most surprising insight I took from this wonderful book was that Edison's most profound inventions were startling unoriginal. He was, on balance, much more of an improver or "perfecter" than an innovator. Beginning with the telegraph (e.g. the "Quadruplex"), and including his monumental work on the carbon filament electric light and the motion picture machine, Edison's preeminent gift was "the ability to adapt or combine ideas or materials already existing as to effect results at once distinctively new and thoroughly practical." Much like a Web 2.0 entrepreneur, Edison took the work of others and made it useful, often revolutionarily so.

There was, however, one aspect of Edison's world that was utterly alien to me: the patent wars. As Josephson writes: "Virtually everything [Edison] ever devised, every idea of his, was disputed by claimants who seemed to spring up on every hand as soon as he executed a patent. If a rival group were wealthy enough they could always dredge up some unknown with prior claims to Edison's inventions, tying him up in the courts for five years." There are patent trolls in Silicon Valley today, for sure, and my old employer, Oracle Corporation, has recently been embroiled in some ugly fights, and the issue is growing in intensity around mobile applications, but generally speaking the life of the tech entrepreneur is not a necessarily litigious one. As "Edison" makes clear, however, it defined the inventor's world in the late 19th century, absolutely negatively so.

An aspect of Edison's era that rings true today, however, is the stultifying impact of monopolies. Josephson describes the technical innovation around the telegraph in the 1870s as white hot and cut throat. But once Western Union zipped up the market through patent consolidation nothing new was introduced for literally decades. The best technical minds in the field simply abandoned the field. The same is true of the telephone and its eventual monopolist, the Bell System, which bought out the essential improving Edison patents on the invention. The unmistakable lesson here is: If you want a better, cheaper product, then you must encourage competition.

Another part of Edison's story that I found relevant was the unanticipated market development of many of his inventions. Most took much longer to gain traction with the consumer than originally calculated, the electrical light being the most conspicuous example. The exception to this rule was the motion picture, which exploded commercially in the late 1890s. Other inventions gained an audience completely unanticipated, at least to Edison and his associates. The phonograph, for instance - perhaps Edison's most original, most technically simple, most socially breathtaking invention - was originally conceived as a device to supplant the amanuensis; the prospect of selling musical records and creating an entertainment industry was completely missed, much to Edison's financial misfortune. And when the radio began to make inroads into the entertainment niche phonographs had created, he resisted movement in that direction believing it was all a passing fad, allowing RCA to become the Google of the Roaring Twenties stock market.

Returning to the theme of contemporary comparison, where some venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road won't consider investing in any entrepreneur over 30-years-old, Edison's most heartbreaking failures or critical lapses in judgment occurred later in life. For example, his ore-separating scheme (including the massive "Baby Ogden" rock crusher), which consumed nearly ten years of his productive life and nearly all of the wealth he gained from the General Electric buyout, was a dismissal failure, even before Rockefeller discovered the Mesabi range in Minnesota that cut the price of iron ore by 75%.

And Edison's "victory" with the motion picture machine was marred by his forced association with Thomas Armat, whose new projection lantern (the so-called "vitascope") provided the critical technical breakthrough that allowed for the screen projection of motion pictures, the same type of tinkering improvement that Edison would have come up with in his earlier days. And just as Edison failed to see the appeal of radio, he also originally failed see the potential for movie theaters, fearing that ten screens nationwide would capture the entire market demand and thus undercut his nickelodeon operations. In short, Edison, the great inventor, was often "disrupted" by the competition.

Just when Henry Ford began to perfect his gasoline driven automobile - a concept that Edison enthusiastically endorsed when he met the young auto entrepreneur who idolized him - Edison devoted himself to a battery powered version of the horseless carriage, a solid century before its time. (Although one could go dizzy thinking about the implications of an Edison discovery that made an electrical automobile practicable in 1900, with its consequent impact on geopolitical affairs in the Middle East.)

Finally, for everything that Edison did to establish electrical power in the United States - indeed, the world - he sunk to disreputable levels to combat the superior AC distribution system developed by the competing Westinghouse organization. The publicity fight including nothing less than the repeated public electrocution of stray dogs and cats to demonstrate to the press the danger of the AC system, a campaign the ignominiously culminated in the successful introduction of the electric chair as the preferred form of capital punishment in the state of New York, a form of execution that the Edison team lobbied to be called "being Westinghoused." Even Josephson asks: Did Edison really switch from being a bold, forward leaning innovator to an ossified conservative in just a decade (1876 to 1888)? For sure, Edison's early years of unclouded glory become strikingly overcast in his later years, as he shifted from one failed ambitious venture to the next, from efforts to help develop technology to defeat the German U-Boat menace during World War I to his botanical pursuit of alternatives to rubber in the twilight of his life, along with the great disappointments of the ore-separating and storage battery schemes.

Thomas Edison was, like many of his inventions, a true original. There were aspects of his style and work found elsewhere, but the sum of this great man was far in excess of the parts. There has never been another like him; there may never be.

This is the only biography of Thomas Edison that I have read, but I was pleased with it. It was accessible to the average reader, though maybe a little too technical for some. For Thomas Edison, the reader should expect some technicalities. After all he, more than any other single person, is responsible for bringing electricity into the homes of human beings. Notice I did not say "Americans." I said "human beings" because Edison was instrumental in bringing electricity into the homes of foreign countries too. By no means, however, do you need a degree in physics to be entertained by this book.

Josephson does not say everything that can possibly be said about this great inventor. For example, Edison was hosted by many leaders and celebrities; yet Josephson says little about such relations. Another example: During the third Academy Awards, Thomas Edison was formally presented with an honorary membership to the Academy, for his pioneering work in the medium of film. Edison gave a talk after the dinner (the first Academy Awards were banquets). Josephson said nothing about this. Of course an eighty-four-year life is too complicated to describe everything.

Here are some of the things that Matthew Josephson focuses on: Edison's boyhood, his psychology, his two wives, his finances, his employees, his homes, his relation with Henry Ford, and--especially--his inventions, his struggles with them, and his failures. I believe this was a reasonable focus. If Josephson had included much of the information that he omitted, his book would have been boring. And he is reasonably objective, neither apologetic nor condemnatory. Edison had some obvious flaws in character, which are described. On the other hand, though Edison's friend Henry Ford seems to have been infected with anti-Semitism, Josephson argues that Edison was not infected.

The narrative jumps around a little, though this was tolerable and Josephson felt it was necessary. Generally the story proceeds in chronological order. Though Strunk & White ("The Elements of Style") might slap Josephson's wrists a good number of times for gaffs in style, "Edison: A Biography" is easy to understand. Footnotes are plentiful, though without a bibliography. The index is not as good as it could have been, but it's there and it's okay. My trade paperback (John Wiley & Sons, 1992, 512 pages) includes 39 glossy photos, which is a pretty good selection.

I primarily read biographies and find that this one is particularly good in that it is very detailed and complete. It's fascinating story of a very unusual man. I highly recommend it.