Stross, Randall. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World.

AuthorGreen, Harold M.
PositionBook review

Stross, Randall. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007. 376 pages. Cloth, $24.95; paper, $15.

With 1,093 U.S. patents to his credit, Thomas Alva Edison carved out a niche for himself as one of the truly prodigious and iconic figures in the annals of science and technology. As a leading Edison scholar, Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University, so aptly observed a decade ago: "In the United States, where few questioned the values of technological progress, Edison, the 'uncommon' common man, had become a revolutionary figure akin to the [F]ounding [F]athers. He did not just invent new and useful things but changed the way men and women lived." (1)

The life and work of Edison have been chronicled and scrutinized extensively through the years in numerous biographical studies, beginning with the 1910 two-volume official biography by Frank L. Dyer, Edison's corporate and legal advisor after 1897, and inventor Thomas C. Martin, entitled Edison: His Life and Inventions. Another significant early study published several years after his death was Thomas A. Edison: A Modern Olympian by Mary Childs Nerney (1934). In this work, Nerney, who had worked for Edison as an archivist, excelled in her psychological analysis of Edison's genius. More recent additions to this body of literature include the finely nuanced portrait by award-winning author Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (1959), and biographer Robert Conot's A Streak of Luck (1979), in which Conot deftly shows how throughout his life Edison engaged in many projects simultaneously. Finally, there is Israel's comprehensive and scholarly volume mentioned earlier, Edison: A Life of Invention (1998), which, among other things, sheds new light on Edison's early years (pp. 1-48) and on his later role as "inventor-philosopher" (pp. 440-62). Add to this the published memoirs of one of Edison's business managers, Alfred O. Tate (Edison's Open Door, 1938), and of Edison's laboratory assistant, Francis Jehl (Reminiscences of Menlo Park, 1939, 3 vols.), as well as The Papers of Thomas Alva Edison, the first five volumes of which have been published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and the amount of extant material now accumulated on the inventor is indeed staggering.

Drawing upon these and other sources, both primary and secondary, Randall Stross, a Stanford-trained historian and New York Times...

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