Edison. A Life Of Invention

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Wiley
Publisher Place: Canada
Publisher Year: 1998
Edition: First Edition

Description: 552 pages. Book is in Very good condition throughout.

Publishers Description: From the preeminent Edison scholar . . . The definitive life of the inventor of the modern ageThe conventional story is so familiar and reassuring that it has come to read more like American myth than history: With only three months of formal education, a curious and hardworking young man beats the odds and becomes one of the greatest inventors in history. Not only does he invent the phonograph and the first successful electric light bulb, but he also establishes the first electrical power distribution company and lays the technological groundwork for todays movies, telephones, and sound recording industry. Through relentless tinkering, by trial and error, the story goes, Thomas Alva Edison perseveres-and changes the world.In the revelatory Edison: A Life of Invention, author Paul Israel exposes and enriches this one-dimensional view of the solitary "Wizard of Menlo Park," expertly situating his subject within a thoroughly realized portrait of a burgeoning country on the brink of massive change. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of corporate America, and with it the newly overlapping interests of scientific, technological, and industrial cultures. Working against the common perception of Edison as a symbol of a mythic American past where persistence and individuality yielded hard-earned success, Israel demonstrates how Edisons remarkable career was actually very much a product of the inventors fast-changing era. Edison drew widely from contemporary scientific knowledge and research, and was a crucial figure in the transformation of invention into modern corporate research and collaborative development.Informed by more than five million pages of archival documents, Paul Israels ambitious life of Edison brightens the unexamined corners of a singularly influential and triumphant career in science. In these pages, historys most prolific inventor-he received an astounding 1,093 U.S. patents-comes to life as never before. Edison is the only biography to cover the whole of Edisons career in invention, including his early, foundational work in telegraphy. Armed with unprecedented access to Edisons workshop diaries, notebooks, and letters, Israel brings fresh insights into how the inventors creative mind worked. And for the first time, much attention is devoted to his early family life in Ohio and Michigan-where the young Edison honed his entrepreneurial sense and eye for innovation as a newsstand owner and editor of a weekly newspaper-underscoring the inventors later successes with new resonance and pathos.In recognizing the inventors legacy as a pivotal figure in the second Industrial Revolution, Israel highlights Edisons creation of the industrial research laboratory, driven by intricately structured teams of researchers. The efficient lab forever changed the previously serendipitous art of workshop invention into something regular, predictable, and very attractive to corporate business leaders. Indeed, Edisons collaborative research model became the prototype upon which todays research firms and think tanks are based.The portrait of Thomas Alva Edison that emerges from this peerless biography is of a man of genius and astounding foresight. It is also a portrait rendered with incredible care, depth, and dimension, rescuing our centurys godfather of invention from myth and simplification.Advance Praise for Edison: A Life of Invention"Familiar Edison stories come alive with fresh insight . . . Israels scholarship is impeccable while his deceptively easy grace transforms a challenging story into a page turner. One hundred years of history texts have been right all along. Thomas Edison, a protean actor on the American landscape, requires our attention. Paul Israel has given us a book to satisfy that requirement for a long time to come."- John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Editor, Technology and Culture

ISBN: 9780471362708