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Edison Kindle Edition

by Edmund Morris (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris comes a revelatory new biography of Thomas Alva Edison, the most prolific genius in American history.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews

Although Thomas Alva Edison was the most famous American of his time, and remains an international name today, he is mostly remembered only for the gift of universal electric light. His invention of the first practical incandescent lamp 140 years ago so dazzled the world—already reeling from his invention of the phonograph and dozens of other revolutionary devices—that it cast a shadow over his later achievements. In all, this near-deaf genius (“I haven’t heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old”) patented 1,093 inventions, not including others, such as the X-ray fluoroscope, that he left unlicensed for the benefit of medicine.

One of the achievements of this staggering new biography, the first major life of Edison in more than twenty years, is that it portrays the unknown Edison—the philosopher, the futurist, the chemist, the botanist, the wartime defense adviser, the founder of nearly 250 companies—as fully as it deconstructs the Edison of mythological memory. Edmund Morris, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, brings to the task all the interpretive acuity and literary elegance that distinguished his previous biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Ludwig van Beethoven. A trained musician, Morris is especially well equipped to recount Edison’s fifty-year obsession with recording technology and his pioneering advances in the synchronization of movies and sound. Morris sweeps aside conspiratorial theories positing an enmity between Edison and Nikola Tesla and presents proof of their mutually admiring, if wary, relationship.

Enlightened by seven years of research among the five million pages of original documents preserved in Edison’s huge laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey, and privileged access to family papers still held in trust, Morris is also able to bring his subject to life on the page—the adored yet autocratic and often neglectful husband of two wives and father of six children. If the great man who emerges from it is less a sentimental hero than an overwhelming force of nature, driven onward by compulsive creativity, then Edison is at last getting his biographical due.

From the Publisher

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Praise for the Biographies of Edmund Morris

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“One of those rare works that is both definitive for the period it covers and fascinating to read for sheer entertainment.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A towering biography.”—Time

Theodore Rex

“A masterpiece . . . A great president has finally found a great biographer.”—The Washington Post

“As a literary work on Theodore Roosevelt, it is unlikely ever to be surpassed. It is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams’s volumes on Jefferson and Madison.”—The Times Literary Supplement

Colonel Roosevelt

“Monumental . . . Morris is a stylish storyteller with an irresistible subject.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Hair-raising . . . awe-inspiring . . . a worthy close to a trilogy sure to be regarded as one of the best studies not just of any president, but of any American.”—San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Edmund Morris was born and educated in Kenya and attended college in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. His first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980. Its sequel, Theodore Rex, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography in 2001. In between these two books, Morris became President Reagan’s authorized biographer and wrote the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. He then completed his trilogy on the life of the twenty-sixth president with Colonel Roosevelt, also a bestseller, and has published Beethoven: The Universal Composer and This Living Hand and Other Essays. Edison is his final work of biography. He was married to fellow biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris for fifty-two years. Edmund Morris died in 2019.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

At seventy-three, with his wartime career as president of the Naval Consulting Board behind him, Edison tried to make sense of a new intellectual order that challenged everything he had learned of Newtonian theory. Abstract thought did not come easily to him. “My line of sorrow,” he wrote, “lies in the realm of technical science.” He needed to feel things come together under his hands, see the filament glow, smell the carbolic acid, and—as far as possible for a near-deaf man—hear the “molecular concussions” of music.1

Laws such as those of Faraday’s electromagnetic induction and Ohm’s relation of current, voltage, and resistance he understood, having applied them himself in the laboratory. But now, if only to slow as much as possible the entropy of his own particles (the fate of all systems, according to Lord Kelvin), Edison studied Einstein’s general theory of relativity.2 The recent solar eclipse had persuaded him, along with the academic scientists he mocked as “the bulge-headed fraternity,” that the theory was valid—even if it failed to suggest any correlation between his attempt to measure the total eclipse of 1878 and his subsequent perfection of incandescent electric light.3

The urtext of the theory, as translated by Robert Lawson, defeated him after only eleven pages. “Einstein like every other mathematical mind,” he scrawled in the margin of his copy, “has not the slightest capacity to impart to the lay mind even an inkling of the subject he tries to explain.” He turned for help to an interpretive essay—Georges de Bothezat’s “The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Glance into the Nature of the Question”—and filled thirty-one notebook pages with scrawled paraphrases of its main points.4

Gravitation is due to the retardation in velocity of the ultimate particle in passing through the fixed aggregates of matter. Ultimate particles fill the whole of space and proceed in every direction. . . .

He could imagine that at least in terms of his own observation, forty years before, of the thermionic emission of carbon electrons in a lightbulb after evacuation—a mysterious darkening since known as the “Edison Effect.” It was about as far as he ever got in his search for a “new force” in electrochemistry. Disparaged at the time by his peers, he now knew that he had discovered, if not recognized, the phenomenon of radio waves eight years before Heinrich Hertz.

Wireless waves cannot proceed thru space but thru Matter in combination with the ultimate particle. . . . From this, if true, all matter is formed of the same material.

Edison had once teased a science fiction writer with the notion of interchanging atoms of himself with those of a rose. He noted that Einstein envisaged particles in space with common axes converging into solidly constituted “rings,” while others remained ethereal. Hence the “primal ring” of the solar system, with its interplanetary nothingness.

We now have matter in a form which is polar & capable of producing what we call Magnetism & Electricity.

The religion boys, of course, would protest that what drew particles together was the will of God. Edison was as ready as Einstein to believe in a “Supreme Intelligence” made manifest by the order and beauty of the stars, and equally reluctant to personalize it: “I cannot conceive such a thing as a spirit.” The furthest he would go in the direction of metaphysics was to imagine the subcellular particles of a human being as “infinitesimally small individuals, each itself a unit of life.”5

These units work in squads—or swarms, as I prefer to call them—and . . . live for ever. When we “die” these swarms of units, like a swarm of bees, so to speak, betake themselves elsewhere and go on functioning in some other form or environment. If the units of life which compose an individual’s memory hold together after that individual’s death, is it not within the range of possibility . . . that these memory swarms could retain what we call the individual’s personality after the dissolution of the body?

Having thus anticipated by more than a century both swarm intelligence and DNA inheritance theory, Edison gave up trying to understand relativity and returned to the more tangible universe he preferred.

A Big Bump for Cookies

As he saw it, his first order of business in the new decade was to reimpose his own—highly individual—personality upon Thomas A. Edison, Inc., the sprawling industrial conglomerate that he had been forced to neglect during the war. He chose not to notice that it had thereby done much better than it had in earlier years, when he had run its manifold activities—phonograph and record production, movie making, cement milling, storage battery development, and laboratory research—with such autocratic willfulness as to make his executives despair of ever influencing him.

Edison was not an easy man to advise, being a combination of twinkling charm and bruising imperiousness. In his youth the charm had prevailed, but now that he was a septuagenarian and almost unreachably deaf, the urge to overbear had become a compulsion, and he had lost much of the bonhomie that had kept thousands of men working for him, and worshiping him, over the past half-century. Long gone was the perpetual hint of a smile flickering around the corners of his mouth, as if he were about to break into thigh-slapping laughter. The artist Richard Outcault remembered its radiance back in ’89, when “the boys” presented “the Old Man” with a gold and silver phonograph for his birthday. “Edison’s smile! [It] sweetened up the atmosphere of the whole building. . . . As long as I live the sweet spirit that pervaded the atmosphere of the laboratory will always remain with me.”6

Edison still moved with the jerky energy that kept him awake, and acting more decisively, than young men unable to match his eighteen-hour-a-day schedule. He regarded exercise as a waste of time, and sleep even more so. Since he was twenty, he had maintained his 175-pound, five-foot-nine-and-a-half-inch frame with only a few lapses, quickly corrected. (“I do believe I have a big bump for cookies.”) The most remarkable thing about his appearance, apart from the brilliance of the blue-gray eyes, was the largeness of his head, amplified by its thick mop of snowy hair. He wore custom-made size eight-and-a-half straw hats, and slashed the bands of his caps for comfort. His handshake was perfunctory and surprisingly cold. Monomaniacally focused on whatever current project interested him, he strode at a forward angle, hands in vest pockets, aware only of his destination and completely unconscious of time. He never wore a watch, and made no distinction between day and night, nodding off when he felt like it and expecting his assistants to follow suit. The same went for waking up. If two hours of rest was enough for him, he did not see why anyone else should want more.7

Lovable as he was—or had been in the past—Edison did not return affection, beyond the occasional beaming familiarity, in which there was often a note of tease. He thought hurtful practical jokes—electrified washbasins, a wad of chewing tobacco spat onto a white summer suit, firecrackers tossed at the bare feet of children—were funny. Having made money easily all his life, thanks to phenomenal energy and the mysterious gift of imagination (his personal wealth, at latest calculation, was almost $10 million), he was unmoved by the lesser luck or ill fortune of others, and casual about the loneliness of his wives. Now, returning to his laboratory desk in 1920, he was determined to teach Charles Edison a thing or two about running a large corporation.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07NCMDWZD
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (October 22, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 22, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 71991 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 737 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #367,879 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #9 in Scientific Instruments (Kindle Store)
- #19 in Scientific Instruments (Books)
- #145 in Business Technology Innovation

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Edmund Morris

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Edmund Morris is one of America's best political biographers and journalists. He is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. He lives in New York and Washington, DC.

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Andrew Baron

Lots of new and engaging, historically-footnoted information

Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2019

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As a frame of reference, over the past four and a half decades I've read all of the Edison and Tesla biographies, going back to the first "Edison & His Inventions" of 1879. I was delighted to learn much more from this new biography than I have from the others, with much new and enriching material presented, all carefully footnoted and referenced. Of particular interest are several pieces of communication and comments that Edison and Tesla made to and about each other, which cast a very different light on the popular conception of their relationship.

Most of the Edison biographies (and Tesla's as well) have been highly derivative of content from prior published work, and if footnoted sources were given at all, they often led to a source that itself was not footnoted or was absent of any referenced primary historical data at all. Other biographical work that has done a fine job of maintaining professional and historical integrity, has nonetheless been of a scholarly bent and might not appeal to a general audience. I am giving Edmund Morris's book 5 stars because he not only provides voluminous original source material references, but because he writes as a mature author who knows how to put the pieces together, and when he does editorialize it is with unusual insight that rings true to this seasoned reader. Morris knows and portrays his subject and his subject's personality traits unusually well, and does not shy away from conveying the personality flaws that make Edison such a complex character. This is not a hagiographic account, so those looking for hero worship of a saintly personality may be disillusioned.

What does come through however, in addition to the flaws, are those aspects of the man that are honorable and noteworthy. Those for whom Edison has had enduring appeal will likely come away with a deeper appreciation of the inventor's personality and its influences, shaping the man he ultimately became.

Reviews have commented on the author's peculiar choice of telling the story chronologically backwards. This does take some getting used to and can be momentarily disorienting, but I think I understand the author's intent. As each layer of Edison's challenges, his reactions to them and their consequences gets peeled away, the more clearly and plainly we comprehend how his personality evolved. There is something uncannily effective about the journey toward a greater innocence and naivety, as we gradually come to understand how these traits became leitmotifs in Edison's life, as others came to be added, along the way to a long and remarkable life.

8 people found this helpful

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Kevin Quinley

Benjamin Button-esque, Unorthodox Biography, Exhaustive and Exhausting

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2021

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The book is an exhaustive -- and at times exhausting -- treatment in detail of Edison's life. Large sections of it that are so technical and detailed that my eyes glazed over and I skimmed over the material. You will get a deep dive into electricity and various engineering minutiae of Edison's prolific inventive mind.

What comes through was Edison's almost superhuman, inexhaustible, indefatigable energy and intellectual wattage. He would work for long stretches of time without sleeping or eating, so focused on his experiments, inventions and projects. His mind was constantly churning with ideas as he filled notebooks with future visions and projects. He would try hundreds, thousands of methods and experiments until he found a solution to the problem that he was tackling. His intellectual persistence seems superhuman. It is hard to think of another individual who was his prolific and productive through sheer output of ideas and ingenious inventions.

This is not a hagiography, however, that lionizes Edison. Feet of clay show through. The book shows him, warts and all. He seemed to lack business savvy and flirted with financial problems despite the massive financial windfalls available from his various inventions, patents and products. He wed twice, but one gets the impression that he essentially lived a life separate from his wives, so absorbed was he with his work. His children became afterthoughts as well; it is hard to say that he had any relationship with them other than monetarily. He fathered children, but did not seem to be much of a Dad to his children, many of whom suffered from lacking much other than a genetic/biological relationship with him.

The curious feature of this book is its unorthodox structure and organization. I am a huge fan of Edmund Morris and -- in particular -- his three-volume opus on the life of Theodore Roosevelt. Unlike those books, however, Morris opts for a weird organizational structure to this biography. Essentially, he begins the book at the end of Edison's life and then works backwards in roughly ten-year chunks from the end-of-life, ending with Edison's boyhood in Ohio. It is a Benjamin Button-esque approach to biography. It is not reader-friendly and evokes some head-scratching.

One might expect that, in a Preface/Foreword, either Morris or his Editor posthumously would have provided context for the unorthodox, counterintuitive anti-chronological approach used here. It's almost as though Morris was saying, "I did it because . . . well, I can!"

As other reviewers have correctly noted, one workaround is to simply read the chapters in reverse order. I chose not to do that, but why not make the manuscript as reader-friendly as possible or provide context for the unorthodox biographical approach? A rhetorical question but a legitimate one nonetheless.

Ultimately, this was a detailed biography of perhaps America's most prolific inventor. The technical details and approach to the narrative however at times tested my willpower to grind on through to the very end. Your mileage may vary.

12 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Edison Descendent Brief Comment

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2023

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This is the best detailed history of Edison I have ever read. The writing is smooth and conversational. The research is well-targeted and thought-provoking. Telling Edison's story backward from the end of his life allowed me to jump into the middle of major events rather than having to plow through a lot of childhood stories as background before getting to the really big public, economic, industrial, and scientific events. The format worked very well for me as a reader.
Morris's interpretation of a number of events corresponds to my perceptions based on family letters and conversations with my grandmother Madeleine Edison [Sloane]. I think she would have liked this book.
David Edward Edison Sloane

4 people found this helpful

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MP

Awesome Book

Reviewed in India on May 15, 2023

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This book is totally awesome, the writing style is such a high standard, good illustration, the page quality is high (paperback). I recommend to everyone to read this book and happy reading....

Don

The best biography of Thomas Edison, detailed and documented.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 20, 2021

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As much about business as invention. An implicit guide to life: Half what to do and half what not to do. Edited, you might say, by Sigmund Freud.

WF van der Hart

Annoying reversed chronology of his life

Reviewed in Germany on May 8, 2021

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Impressive inventor and the book is filled with lots of historic fragments of his life. Just don't get why the writer decided to reverse the order of the biography. So annoying to read from his older years to the younger years, what a waste of an otherwise good book.

Arend Smid

It's a book.

Reviewed in Canada on December 18, 2019

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Educational..?