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Loading... Edison Inventing the Century (1995)| 263 | 2 | 102,511 | 
(3.65) | 4 | Neil Baldwin's Edison: Inventing the Century is the first biography of one of the seminal figures in our history to examine him as both myth and man, assessing his remarkable accomplishments while taking thorough measure of the paradoxes of his character. Drawing upon unprecedented access to Edison family papers and years of research at the Edison corporate archives, Baldwin offers a revealing portrait of the inventor, in which we discover a man whose life epitomized the American dream as fully as he became a victim of its darker side.
From his years as a fragile boy hawking newspapers on trains throughout the Midwest to his arrival in New York City as an itinerant telegrapher seeking his fortune; from his development of the light bulb to his spectacular electrification of lower Manhattan; from his struggles to create the phonograph and motion picture and bring them to market to his obsessive search for a source of natural rubber even as he was dying, Edison: Inventing the Century is an enthralling chronicle of the most revered figure of his time.
Alongside the esteemed scientist stands the fiercely self-aggrandizing manufacturer of his own myth; the man possessed by a virtually incessant flow of ideas, who often fights brutally to protect those ideas in the marketplace; the man who publicly preaches the values of home life while his own family is plagued by clinical depression and alcoholism, and while his six neglected, aimless children from two marriages try to step from his massive shadow, yet prove, almost inevitably, to be a disappointment.… (more) |
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Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time - Frederick Jackson Turner, An American Definition of History, 1891  A. B. Dick, the mimeograph manufacturer, saw Thomas Edison in Paris during the great Electrical Exhibition of 1889, and they renewed their old acquaintance over lunch. Mr. Dick told me, "Mr. Garrity, I can remember it just as if it occurred yesterday. Edison threw his arm over my shoulder as we were walking down the street from the restaurant, and said, 'Dick, I would give everything I own to be a young man like you again because there is so much I want to accomplish before I die. I won't get 1/10 of 1% of it done!' I was 33, and Mr. Edison was 42." - Patrick Garrity, member of the "Edison Pioneers," 1918 The old nations of the earth keep on at a snail's pace. The Republic thunders past with the rush of the express train. - Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy, 1886 Inventors must be poets so that they may have imagination. - Thomas A. Edison, 1925 | |
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Once again, for Roberta | |
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Because you are about to read a big, American story with a household name at its centerpiece, I would like to caution you against looking only for the expected landmarks along the road. (from the Preface) In the beginning, two Dutch Edesons -- pronounced with a long A at the start -- arrived in America. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions Neil Baldwin's Edison: Inventing the Century is the first biography of one of the seminal figures in our history to examine him as both myth and man, assessing his remarkable accomplishments while taking thorough measure of the paradoxes of his character. Drawing upon unprecedented access to Edison family papers and years of research at the Edison corporate archives, Baldwin offers a revealing portrait of the inventor, in which we discover a man whose life epitomized the American dream as fully as he became a victim of its darker side.
From his years as a fragile boy hawking newspapers on trains throughout the Midwest to his arrival in New York City as an itinerant telegrapher seeking his fortune; from his development of the light bulb to his spectacular electrification of lower Manhattan; from his struggles to create the phonograph and motion picture and bring them to market to his obsessive search for a source of natural rubber even as he was dying, Edison: Inventing the Century is an enthralling chronicle of the most revered figure of his time.
Alongside the esteemed scientist stands the fiercely self-aggrandizing manufacturer of his own myth; the man possessed by a virtually incessant flow of ideas, who often fights brutally to protect those ideas in the marketplace; the man who publicly preaches the values of home life while his own family is plagued by clinical depression and alcoholism, and while his six neglected, aimless children from two marriages try to step from his massive shadow, yet prove, almost inevitably, to be a disappointment. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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