

Edison may have figured out how to illuminate the world, but Morris makes us wonder how best to illuminate a life.Įdison did not actually invent the light bulb, of course. Lauded for his trilogy of books about Theodore Roosevelt, Morris was scolded for his peculiar book about Ronald Reagan. The real nature of his genius is clarified in “ Edison” (Random House), a new biography by Edmund Morris, a writer who famously struggled with just how inventive a biographer should be. Even some of his admirers, though, have misunderstood his particular form of inventiveness, which was never about creating something out of nothing. His defenders counter that his celebrity was commensurate with his brilliance. His was a household name, not least because his name was in every household-plastered on the appliances, devices, and products that defined modernity for so many families.Įdison’s detractors insist that his greatest invention was his own fame, cultivated at the expense of collaborators and competitors alike. At the time of his death, according to one estimate, about fifteen billion dollars of the national economy derived from his inventions alone. But he founded more than a hundred companies and employed thousands of assistants, engineers, machinists, and researchers. Edison never got anywhere with his ink for the blind, whatever that was meant to be his concrete furniture, though durable, was doomed and his failed innovations in mining lost him several fortunes. Not all these inventions worked or made money.

Plus: a sap extractor, a talking doll, the world’s largest rock crusher, an electric pen, a fruit preserver, and a tornado-proof house. There was the light bulb and the phonograph, of course, but also the kinetoscope, the dictating machine, the alkaline battery, and the electric meter. On a single day in 1888, he wrote down a hundred and twelve ideas averaged across his adult life, he patented something roughly every eleven days. That made sense, by a kind of transitive property of ingenuity: during his lifetime, Edison patented a record-setting one thousand and ninety-three different inventions. Thomas Edison was already well known by the time he perfected the long-burning incandescent light bulb, but he was photographed next to one of them so often that the public came to associate the bulbs with invention itself. What made the light bulb such an irresistible image for ideas was not just the invention but its inventor. Earlier innovations had literalized the experience of “seeing the light,” but no one went around talking about torchlight moments or sketching candles into cartoon thought bubbles. But, of all the ideas that have ever turned into inventions, only the light bulb became a symbol of ideas. There were ideas long before there were light bulbs. Stop making excuses for letting all of that junk mail slip through or leaving hundreds of messages unread, you can do something about it now.This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. If you’re struggling to navigate through an overcrowded inbox, it’s probably the right time for you to check out one of these email apps for your iOS device.
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