Paul Edison: Edison: A life of invention

By LAWRENCE CARTER

New York, December 1877: a time before radio, television, or any kind of recorded speech or music. The fastest means of communication was the clicking, wire-carried telegraph, and the telephone was in its extreme infancy.

At the offices of the magazine Scientific American, Thomas Edison had an appointment. He placed on the editor's desk a small, lathe-like device with a handle at one end and a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil. He turned the handle, and the machine began to speak.

Today, we can hardly imagine the amazement of the editor and his staff.

In his words: "The machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night. These remarks were not only perfectly audible to ourselves, but to a dozen or more persons gathered around, and they were produced by the aid of no other mechanism than the simple little contrivance explained and illustrated below."

During a long life devoted to innovation, Thomas Alva Edison produced many inventions of significance to us all: electrical power supply, the electric light bulb, the telephone's carbon microphone, motion pictures, and more.

He made important improvements to the telegraph, and developed this into a way of reporting stock exchange news. He tried to improve the electric battery, and developed new technology for crushing ore.

The reason he became a legend in his own lifetime, though, was his invention of the phonograph in those last few weeks of 1877. Here was a machine that, for the first time in history, could record speech and music and reproduce them later.

Edison did not at first realise the significance of his discovery: he had been working on apparatus for recording telegraph signals, and this just seemed a logical extension - something to record telephone signals.

As the phonograph developed into a completely new home entertainment industry, though, the imagination of the public was well and truly caught. Edison's name became synonymous with the heady feeling that, in the rapidly growing America of the 1800s, absolutely anything was possible.

Paul Israel's biography of Edison is a solid piece of work: running to more than 500 pages, it is packed with the detail of Edison's life, from a schoolboy entrepreneur employing other boys to sell newspapers for him, to a telegraph operator tinkering with the technology to improve it, to the "wizard" with his laboratories at Menlo Park, and later at Orange, New Jersey, and to his death in 1931 as the grand old man of American invention.

Edison's inventive success was due to his technique of trying many different ways of solving a problem. His shops formed the basis for today's corporate research laboratories, but lacked today's team approach: although he had assistants, Edison was clearly the driving force.

The book benefits from Israel's access to Edison's papers, and contains many scribbled sketches, made at the moment of invention. There are 58 pages of notes and references, and a comprehensive index.

For all this, though, I was left at the end with a sense of disappointment. Despite the detail, there is little in the book about Edison the man. We read something about his family, all rather shadowy figures in the light of the great man; and we learn that Edison liked a good laugh with the boys at the lab, and was fond of practical jokes. Beyond that, though, little emerges, although this is probably not Israel's fault: it seems that little else was to be had. Great inventor, but perhaps a bit of a bore ...

Wiley

$29.95

* Lawrence Carter is an electrical engineer.