Rating: 
Summary: Very Well Done
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Very Well Done
Review: 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 prototype upon which today's research firms and think tanks are based. The portrait of Thomas Alva Edison that emerges from this peerless biography is of a man of genius and astounding foresight. It is also a portrait rendered with incredible care, depth, and dimension, rescuing our century's godfather of invention from myth and simplification. Paul Israel is the Managing Editor of the multivolume documentary edition of the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University and the coauthor of Edison's Electric Light. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey.
Rating:
Summary: Definitive Biography of Edison
Review: 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 prototype upon which today's research firms and think tanks are based. The portrait of Thomas Alva Edison that emerges from this peerless biography is of a man of genius and astounding foresight. It is also a portrait rendered with incredible care, depth, and dimension, rescuing our century's godfather of invention from myth and simplification. Paul Israel is the Managing Editor of the multivolume documentary edition of the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University and the coauthor of Edison's Electric Light. He lives in Highland Park, New Jersey.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT BIOGRAPHY OF EDISON
Review: This book is great for anyone to read. This is one of thoughs books that really sums up Edison and it doesent leave anything out. It is a truly great book.
Rating:
Summary: Edison - A Life of Invention
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Edison - A Life of Invention
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: The best biography of Edison so far
Review: This is the first biography of Edison with real details about how he and his co-workers carried out the process of invention. The best previous Edison biography (Neil Baldwin's Edison: Inventing the Century (1995)) contains many interesting personal anecdotes but lacks the sort of research and development details required by a technically oriented reader. Paul Israel's scholarly work is a much needed addition to the history of technology.
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