The greatest American inventor, most would agree, was Thomas Alva Edison, but it may be that his greatest invention was himself, as image in the newspapers and as "Thomas A. Edison", a phrase that was an important addition to any marketable gadget. In _The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Edison Invented the Modern World_ (Crown), Randall Stross has looked at the mechanical and electric inventions, few of which Edison single-handedly originated or developed, but has concentrated mostly on his fame. "Once brought into being," Stross writes, "Edison's image inhabited its own life and acted autonomously in ways that its namesake could not control." Stross, a historian who is a professor of business, makes the case that Edison discovered the importance of the application of celebrity to business. We had celebrities before, of course, presidents and generals, and contemporary with Edison were famous figures like Mark Twain and P. T. Barnum. Edison's celebrity exceeded them all, and oddly, he was famous because he was an inventor. When celebrity came to him, he was not an inventor who had made a practical gadget like a cotton gin, a telegraph, or an elevator; he had invented (and had come far short of perfecting) the phonograph. It was the celebrity from this particular machine that carried him through many ups and downs in his long life.
This is not a complete biography, but a welcome look at particular qualities of Edison's celebrity and its effects on his life and business practices. Edison jumped from the most modern technology of the time, telegraphy, and was working on improved telephones, not on voice recording in 1877. The world was dazzled by the prospect of a machine that could talk, but the phonograph sat in its unperfected form for another ten years as he went about other projects, and this was despite a clamor for the machine and an elevation of Edison in the public mind to "mythic inventor hero". Edison was happiest when he was tinkering wherever his whimsy carried him; he was good at coming up with new ideas, bad at working on perfecting them, and terrible at making them pay. He understood the importance of his fame, and used it, although he could not control all the ways others put it to use or all the ways that it took time out of his other activities. He made himself available to the press, and reporters loved interviewing the plain-talking inventor who would chew tobacco throughout such visits. He loved the role of wise advisor, and the press liked him to pontificate on all sorts of matters that had nothing to do with his areas of expertise, like diet.
Edison was no charlatan. Even though he took credit when it actually belonged to those who worked for him, and even though the public insisted on crediting him for inventions others had perfected, he did have a real role in innovating gadgets. As time went on (he lived until 1931) and his public persona as a wizard continued, people tended to forget his many failures; all of his most famous inventions were early in his career, and all amounted to little while he was the one in control of their manufacture and marketing. It would be unfair to judge him just on his earnings, but one of his sons was probably right when he bitterly complained, "You should have been... a millionaire 10 times over if you knew how to handle your own achievements." Such a skill was not within his wizardry, however. Stross shows that Edison could not focus on a new project and bring it to commercial fruition without getting distracted by other endeavors, and that often the distracting endeavor was that of making himself a celebrity. He was wildly successful in this, but it proved to be a strain that he could not enjoy or control. Stross sums up: "Edison failed to invent a way to free himself from unrealistic expectations produced by his own past."
