Edison

by Paul Israel

Book Overview

Ein Bestseller jetzt neu als Broschurausgabe! Die gebundene Ausgabe erzielte hervorragende Kritiken im Daily Telegraph, New Scientist, The Independent und in der Sunday Times - um nur einige zu nennen. Israel hatte erstmals Zugang zu Werkstatt-Tagebüchern, Briefen und mehr als fünf Millionen Seiten Archivmaterial. Auf der Basis dieser Informationen hat er die erste ma gebende Biographie von Edison verfa t. Zum ersten Mal wird Edisons Karriere als...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471362700
• ISBN13: 9780471362708
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 560 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

amazing

I had to read this book for class and was not very enthusiastic about it. It turns out that this book is very insightful and possibly the best book on Edison I have ever read.

superb scholarly and technical treatment

I was given this book for a writing project and dutifully plowed through it over the Christmas holidays. Overall, I must say that it was an absolutely excellent holiday book as well as chock full of useful ideas for my scholarly purposes. This is an extremely difficult balance to strike and Israel has done it better than I thought possible - I was prepared for a long dry slog and instead found a great and exciting story.Edison, Israel argues, was not just a lone little-educated tinkerer of genius as he is often portrayed, but the creator of the prototype for the modern corporate research lab - he knew how to find talent, how to organize it to get the most out of people, and how to beat the competition by both speed and in the creation of entire new systems of technology. He also knew how to manipulate the media and build on his fame, creating a myth to which he had to live up. That being said, he had a pitch-perfect intuitive sense not only of potential new markets, but of how to create technical solutions to exploit them. He learned from his failures and strove to apply his less-successful inventions elsewhere, often to great effect. Taken together, this was true business genius and Israel explains it all succinctly, including the exposure of Edison's many weaknesses in management and his financial affairs and his many flops (such as the mining experiments that nearly bankrupted him). Furthermore, the basics of his major inventions - improvements to the telegraph and telephone, the light bulb, commerical electricity generation systems, to mention a few - are covered with competence, always with an eye to the management of it all and what it took, all of which are of great use. This adds up to a masterpiece of scholarship and popular writing in my view, crossing a plethora of disciplines in very readable prose and at a good pace of storytelling.However, there are many things that make this a challenging read and in some ways disappointing. Even though I know a lot about science and engineering from my own writing, I found the many passages explaining the nuts and bolts of his inventions hard to follow and ultimately rather dry. If the reader is not interested in these highly technical details, he can skim them without losing the narrative thread. Moreover, Edison as a person does not always come thru, though really he was his work and not much else. You also do not learn much about the fate of his enterprises or even his personal financial fortune after his death, which is also a part of his legacy that should be explored. Finally, Israel addresses somewhat rarified questions in the concluding chapter regarding whether Edison was a "scientist" and how industrial research was changing (developing specialties that required far more education than inventors of Edison's "heroic invention" epoch) to make the emergence of generalist, self-taught inventors like him far more difficult and with limited horizons; while I enjoyed this a great dea

Very Well Done

The author gets ahold of Edison in two ways that struck me as unique: First, by exploring the Edison family's Canadian roots and its non-conformist protestant religious background; and second, by focusing on the intellectual property angle of Edison's work, which explains the journal-keeping and diagramming Edison picked up from his attorneys.Edison's wandering years as a telegraph operator are also explored skilfully, including little known facts such as Edison's near-depature to South America to seek his fortune.

Definitive Biography of Edison

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. 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. Through relentless tinkering, by trial and error, the story goes, Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) perseveres-and changes the world.In the revelatory Edison: A Life of Invention, the author 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 Edison's remarkable career was actually very much a product of the inventor's 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, this ambitious biography of Edison brightens the unexamined corners of a singularly influential and triumphant career in science. In these pages, history's 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 Edison's career in invention, including his early, foundational work in telegraphy. Armed with unprecedented access to Edison's workshop diaries, notebooks, and letters, this book brings fresh insights into how the inventor's 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 inventor's later successes with new resonance and pathos.In recognizing the inventor's legacy as a pivotal figure in the second Industrial Revolution, the author highlights Edison's 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, Edison's collaborative research model became the prototy

Edison - A Life of Invention

This is a great work by author and scholar Paul Israel, who gives us an objective picture of Edison, his life, his strengths and his weaknesses. The book has sufficient technical details to satisfy those who seek to learn about his inventions and work, while painting a broad picture of life around him, and how it influenced his own life and work. For some reason, the author has not included the controversial interaction between Edison and contemporary inventor Nikola Tesla, even though the latter worked for a short period for Edison. This however, is of minor consequence to the excellent book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is seriously interested in the history of 19th and early 20th century technology. This is also a great inspirational work for any creative person.