From the preeminent Edison scholar .
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.
Armed with unprecedented access to Edison\'s workshop diaries, notebooks, and letters, Israel brings fresh insights into how the inventor\'s creative mind worked.
Edison is the only biography to cover the whole of Edison\'s career in invention, including his early, foundational work in telegraphy. patents-comes to Life as never before.
In these pages, history\'s most prolific inventor-he received an astounding 1,093 U.
S.
Informed by more than five million pages of archival documents, Paul Israel\'s ambitious Life of Edison brightens the unexamined corners of a singularly influential and triumphant career in science.
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.
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 Edison\'s remarkable career was actually very much a product of the inventor\'s fast-changing era.
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.
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.
Through relentless tinkering, by trial and error, the story goes, Thomas Alva Edison perseveres-and changes the world.
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 today\'s movies, telephones, and sound recording industry.
The definitive Life of the inventor of the modern age The 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. . .
From the preeminent Edison scholar
