Customer Reviews

Thomas A. Edison: A Streak of Luck (Da Capo series in science)

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This book reveals the Thomas Edison you didn't learn about in elementary school. It is insightful and intelligently written. Edison claimed that invention was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. This book makes it look more like 1 percent inspiration, 10 percent perspiration, 20 percent public relations, and 69 percent luck. If you are satisfied with Edison the myth, don't read this book. If you seek the truth (perhaps in too much detail) this is for you. To my mind, the real Edison is far more interesting than the one Mrs. Goldberg taught me about in fifth grade.

It almost seems as if the other reviewers here didn't really read the book.

Forget about comparing the "real" Edison with the legend. Who cares? Buy this book for the glorious technical detail with which the technology and the age are described.

For what will delight you most about this book is the presence of the technical details of many of his inventions, and the experiments and dead ends leading up to them. And like any really good biography, you get a real feel for the era: The beginning of the electric age, when you could still understand electricity as like water in a hose, and tinker great things together with wheels and sparks.

And really, he was a tinkerer with an amazing memory and ability to draw connections between experiments conducted in largely unrelated fields. For example, Edison was trying to make a microphone by placing a needle in a dish of water and observing the changing resistance as the water's surface acted as a diaphragm and moved in response to sound. Not so good.

Meanwhile, while working on a trans-atlantic underwater telegraph cable using carbon as the conductor (Wondering why carbon? No problem, the author explains it!), he noted that the specification that worked on the surface didn't work in deep water.

In his genius, not only did he figure out that compression of the carbon changed its resistance, somehow, he connected this with his work on the microphone. The next thing you know, he's placing a carbon button under a stiff diaphragm and taking the resistance as an analog of the air pressure in the sound wave as experienced by the stiff diaphragm. Until just a few years ago, you could still find a carbon button microphone in the hand piece of every telephone.

Did you know the original idea for electric light was based on having lots and lots of dim bulbs in the room flickering on and off? All designs overheated and the research was aimed at getting the light to switch off before failure, and then back on again. Imagine it; reading by Christmas tree. Outrageous, right? Then put yourself back in time and think of the alternative: gas or candle flame.

Did you know Edison had radiation sickness? Did you know he lost most of his fortune and destroyed acres and acres of farmland trying to extract iron from ore by pulverizing it and sending the dust through an electromagnet? Did you know he made his money back by inventing the alkaline battery?

All this and more. About the lawyers and businessmen and specifics of the deals he made. About the people who worked for him. About his family and how he courted his wives and dealt with his kids (and how they coped with him).

And would you ever have thought he'd actually died of

Conot has captured the details of Edison's much publicized and celebrated scientific endeavors as well as the unpopular personal and business life. This is a well-written chronological story presenting a very `real' Edison beyond the typical school book lessons. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in a more complete picture of Edison's life.

A Streak of Luck by Robert Conot was a very well written book. Robert reveals all the true things about Edison's character and achievements, and he creates an unbiased view of one of history's most famous inventors. Edison was a busy man, who invented over a thousand patents and contributed greatly to the technology of the modern world. Edison was not the friendly genius that everyone thinks he was; he was a rugged self-taught dreamer who did remarkable things. He improved the telegram, invented the light bulb, and started motion pictures. Despite all this, Edison was an all around mean and bad guy. He was an anti-Semite, he capitalized off others inventions, and he demanded of his workers that all of their ideas be submitted to him so he could get credit for them. He was a conceited arrogant jerk who thought his way was always right even though he stumbled on his best inventions by luck. In truth, his inventions really did not have that great of an impact, because even though he got credit for over a thousand patents, if he never existed the same inventions would have still been invented. On all of his important inventions there was other scientists following close behind his lead, and in some cases, he stole their ideas. Robert wrote this book because he wanted the truth about Thomas Edison to be out in the public, and he wanted the public to become disillusioned from the Thomas Edison that is famous. If you want to know the truth about Edison, and not just a fairy tale of a made up character, read A Streak of Luck by Robert Conot. Warning- You will be disillusioned by this knowledge.

This book is such a good read in that it deviates from the standard view of Thomas Edison. When I learned about him in school, my teacher depicted him as a great thinker who is responsible for some of the greatest and most important inventions in history. The incandescent light bulb and the motion picture are two of his most famous and most commonly used inventions. However, of the thousands of other inventions he is credited for and holds patents to, it is hard to tell how many of them he actually invented. Edison was a man built around money, and did everything he could to earn more of it, including stealing other people's ideas and getting patents on them. The image I received of Edison from Thomas Edison: A Streak of Luck by Robert Conot was not one of brilliance and imagination. Instead, I see him as a thief who was incredibly lucky. The author probably decided to write this book to portray a different point of view of Edison, one contrary to popular belief. He wants to break a popular notion about one of America's most famous thinkers. Do not read this book if you are an avid Edison fan. He is portrayed as a completely different person from what is commonly perceived by the public. This is what makes the book so interesting. The faults of famous people are always exciting to read, especially ones that will completely alter your view of someone.

I had heard about Edison not inventing the movie camera on the Bio Channel. He had a team that he took all the credit for what they did. He stole ideas and got sued and lost once. He was always interested in promotion and money. Much of what we would have of him is his own promotion without this book by Robert Conot.

If Edison never lived we would still have all his inventions because others were working on the same ideas. And some had better ideas than him, he would steal would he could.

Amazing how there are literally thousands of news articles (at the time of Edison) and after, more then a hundred books about his genius & entire personality, that anti semite garbage was debunked by historians (Yes Henry Ford was) by a major Edison project at Rutgers University, yet this one book proves that all (yes all) are wrong! Guess you can 'fool' some of the people, some of the time, sure ya can see the other reviews.