Edison: A Life of Invention [Paperback]

Paul Israel (Author)

Book Description

Series: Biography | Publication Date: February 11, 2000

The definitive biography of the century's godfather of invention-from the preeminent Edison scholar

"Israel's meticulous research and refusal to shy away from the dodgier aspects of Edison's personality offers a fresh glimpse into the life of the inventor."-New Scientist

"Remarkable."-Nature

"An authoritative look into Edison's working methods, here leavened by enough personal detail to give the achievements shape."-Publishers Weekly

"Highly recommended."

"Israel's book should go a long way toward taking Edison out of the shadows and placing him in the proper light."-Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Exhaustively researched, with strong emphasis on Edison's methods and achievements."-Kirkus Reviews

The conventional story of Thomas Edison reads more like myth than history: With only three months of formal education, a hardworking young man overcomes the odds and becomes one of the greatest inventors in history. But the portrait that emerges from Edison: A Life of Invention reveals a man of genius and astonishing foresight whose career was actually a product of his fast-changing era. In this peerless biography, Paul Israel exposes for the first time the man behind the inventions, expertly situating his subject within a thoroughly realized portrait of a burgeoning country on the brink of massive change. Informed by Israel's unprecedented access to workshop diaries, notebooks, letters, and more than five million pages of archives, this definitive biography brings fresh insights to a singularly influential and triumphant career in science.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It has been said of Edison that his inventive gifts consisted of 1% genius and 99% hard work. Israel, coauthor of Edison's Electric Light and managing editor of the Thomas Edison Papers (in progress), in effect confirms that assessment. Weighing the competing demands of biographical narrative and technological elucidation, he opts for the latter, showing Edison as tireless experimenter rather than inspired wizard. Israel portrays Edison as an improver of inventions and transformer of concepts into products, someone who applied himself pragmatically to the uses of electricity?from the telegraph and telephone and storage battery to the phonograph, incandescent light and motion picture. Israel shows Edison as a manager of innovation, making the shift from private workshop to corporate research and development with income from royalties. An effective self-publicist, he became in the public mind the central figure of 19th-century invention. He lived, however, into 1931, by which time his brand of empiricism had given way to industrial laboratories on a scale he could not have imagined as a teenage telegrapher in the 1860s. For a flesh-and-blood life one must return to such biographies as Robert Conot's A Streak of Luck (1970) or Neil Baldwin's recent Edison: Inventing the Century. But Israel draws on his subject's notebooks to provide an authoritative look into Edison's working methods, here leavened by enough personal detail to give the achievements shape. When Edison died, the nation extinguished its lights for a minute in tribute. He had not invented either, but he had made electricity work as no one else had. 20 illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Scientific American

Edison's name is on 1,093 U.S. patents--more than any other person's. It is a measure of his renown that his surname alone suffices for the title of this book. Israel, managing editor of the Rutgers University edition of Edison's papers, has explored thoroughly the five million pages of documents housed at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, N.J., and so he is well positioned to discuss the eminent inventor's achievements. That he does with care and clarity. The well-known inventions--the incandescent lightbulb, the phonograph, the kinetoscope for motion pictures, the carbon transmitter for telephones--are all here in detail, and so are the lesser-known ones as well as some Edisonian projects that did not succeed. Israel also paints a clear portrait of the man. One learns, among other things, of Edison's difficult relationships with his children, his indifference to his appearance and his singular notions about diet. (In his last years, when he was suffering from stomach trouble, "he consumed nothing more than a pint of milk every three hours.") Edison may well have been the "Inventor of the age," as he was orotundly described in the Grand Prize that he won at the Universal Exposition of 1878 in Paris, but he was in addition a complex and intriguing human being. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; 1st edition (February 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471362700
• ISBN-13: 978-0471362708
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #502,533 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best biography of Edison so far, November 15, 1998

By A Customer

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This review is from: Edison: A Life of Invention (Hardcover)

This is the first biography of Edison with real details about how he and his co-workers carried out the process of invention. The best previous Edison biography (Neil Baldwin's Edison: Inventing the Century (1995)) contains many interesting personal anecdotes but lacks the sort of research and development details required by a technically oriented reader. Paul Israel's scholarly work is a much needed addition to the history of technology.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars superb scholarly and technical treatment, January 7, 2004

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Edison: A Life of Invention (Paperback)

I was given this book for a writing project and dutifully plowed through it over the Christmas holidays. Overall, I must say that it was an absolutely excellent holiday book as well as chock full of useful ideas for my scholarly purposes. This is an extremely difficult balance to strike and Israel has done it better than I thought possible - I was prepared for a long dry slog and instead found a great and exciting story.

Edison, Israel argues, was not just a lone little-educated tinkerer of genius as he is often portrayed, but the creator of the prototype for the modern corporate research lab - he knew how to find talent, how to organize it to get the most out of people, and how to beat the competition by both speed and in the creation of entire new systems of technology. He also knew how to manipulate the media and build on his fame, creating a myth to which he had to live up. That being said, he had a pitch-perfect intuitive sense not only of potential new markets, but of how to create technical solutions to exploit them. He learned from his failures and strove to apply his less-successful inventions elsewhere, often to great effect. Taken together, this was true business genius and Israel explains it all succinctly, including the exposure of Edison's many weaknesses in management and his financial affairs and his many flops (such as the mining experiments that nearly bankrupted him). Furthermore, the basics of his major inventions - improvements to the telegraph and telephone, the light bulb, commerical electricity generation systems, to mention a few - are covered with competence, always with an eye to the management of it all and what it took, all of which are of great use. This adds up to a masterpiece of scholarship and popular writing in my view, crossing a plethora of disciplines in very readable prose and at a good pace of storytelling.

However, there are many things that make this a challenging read and in some ways disappointing. Even though I know a lot about science and engineering from my own writing, I found the many passages explaining the nuts and bolts of his inventions hard to follow and ultimately rather dry. If the reader is not interested in these highly technical details, he can skim them without losing the narrative thread. Moreover, Edison as a person does not always come thru, though really he was his work and not much else. You also do not learn much about the fate of his enterprises or even his personal financial fortune after his death, which is also a part of his legacy that should be explored. Finally, Israel addresses somewhat rarified questions in the concluding chapter regarding whether Edison was a "scientist" and how industrial research was changing (developing specialties that required far more education than inventors of Edison's "heroic invention" epoch) to make the emergence of generalist, self-taught inventors like him far more difficult and with limited horizons; while I enjoyed this a great deal, it is of limited interest to those who were never steeped in "science policy."

All in all, highest recommendation. It is a great achievement and will stand as one of the definitive biographies of this great and difficult man.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Gird yourself for a long, slow march, June 7, 2005

By 

Josh Daniels "jd83" (Maple Grove, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Edison: A Life of Invention (Paperback)

Reading this book has been an experience for me. I wanted to find out more about the life of one of America's most famous inventors, and this book has helped me along the way, so I give it credit for that. However, I have felt like I am trudging into a mighty windstorm, reaching deep into my soul to plunge each forward step as I slowly turn the pages in this book. There are pockets of enlightenment throughout the book, but it really is a relaying of facts about Edison's life, which is technically what a biography should do, but this book does not come alive in my hands like others have.

To be fair, I did accomplish my goal of learning more about this great man. I learned that a lot his inventions were a result of not just great intellect, but of great work ethic and stick-to-it-iveness. Also, one of his greatest contributions was a corporate model for delegating work among his subordinates. The speed of the development of his inventions was the key, as several other inventors were working on similar ideas at the same time.

Anyway, I recommend the book as a good introduction to the life of Tom, but I am sure that there is a book out there that will give you the same enlightenment without making you feel as though you've crawled on your hands and knees through the Sahara, with a canteen full of lukewarm water that leaks at a very slow rate.