Thomas A. Edison remains rooted in the popular imagination primarily as the inventor of the practical electric light, but he also continues to function in the lexicons of advertising and politics as a symbol of American individualism, ingenuity, and know-how. Introduced here with a broad range of primary sources for discussion, the American inventor emerges as a prolific mind, a tireless worker, and an inveterate self-promoter. Examples of Edison’s own experimental notes, his personal correspondence, as well as press accounts provide an opportunity to explore the themes of modernization and the American ideology of progress. The volume includes an extended introduction, headnotes to the documents, illustrations, a chronology, discussion questions, a bibliography, and an index.

A sweeping history of the electric light revolution and the birth of modern America The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but more than any other invention, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb marked the arrival of modernity, transforming its inventor into a mythic figure and avatar of an era. In The Age of Edison, award-winning author and historian Ernest Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it and capturing the wonder Edison’s invention inspired. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility in which the greater forces of progress and change are made by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.

Thomas A. Edison remains rooted in the popular imagination primarily as the inventor of the practical electric light, but he also continues to function in the lexicons of advertising and politics as a symbol of American individualism, ingenuity, and know-how. Introduced here with a broad range of primary sources for discussion, the American inventor emerges as a prolific mind, a tireless worker, and an inveterate self-promoter. Examples of Edison’s own experimental notes, his personal correspondence, as well as press accounts provide an opportunity to explore the themes of modernization and the American ideology of progress. The volume includes an extended introduction, headnotes to the documents, illustrations, a chronology, discussion questions, a bibliography, and an index.

Everyone knows that Thomas Edison is America's most famous inventor. But what exactly drove him to invent? Have you ever heard of the phonograph, or the kinetoscope? And what made his incandescent light bulb so special anyway? In this book, you will learn about Edison's busy childhood as a young inventor and entrepreneur conducting chemical experiments aboard a moving train car, his nomadic youth as a wandering telegraph operator, and about the five miraculous years of invention that produced the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb, inventions that made Edison the most famous American in history before he was thirty five years old. Through the inclusion of primary documents, including letters written by Edison himself, his diary entries, and newspaper articles from the 19th century and after, this book will help you see through the eyes of an ordinary American glimpsing electric light for the first time, or listening to records on the phonograph, or viewing the very first motion pictures. From his friendship with Henry Ford, to his work for the American navy during World War I, Thomas Edison was the original American hero, lighting all of history with his extraordinary inventions.

What do record players, batteries, and movie cameras have in common? All these devices were created by the man known as The Wizard of Menlo Park: Thomas Edison. Edison is most famous for inventing the incandescent lightbulb, but at his landmark laboratories in Menlo Park & West Orange, New Jersey, he also developed many other staples of modern technology. Despite many failures, Edison persevered. And good for that, because it would be very difficult to go through a day without using one of his life-changing inventions. In this enlightening book, Gene Barretta enters the laboratories of one of America's most important inventors.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Morris comes a revelatory new biography ofThomas Alva Edison, the most prolific genius in American history.

The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.

There have been countless biographies of Edison the man, detailing the course of his life and describing his inventions. The subject of this book is larger than life: Edison the Myth, Edison the Hero. It traces the transmutations of Edison's image in the eyes of his countrymen as the ideal embodiment of American values and virtues: hard work, perseverance, the gospel of technological progress, the mythology of the self-made man, individualism, optimism, practicality mingled with idealism. To the American public in the late nineteenth century, Edison was the Wizard, the archetypal Scientist, and finally the Creator. Many journalistic accounts of the period evoke the Promethean and Faustian legends, depicting Edison as the bringer of light from on high, the worker of miracles designed to delight and ease the life of the common man. Not long after the turn of the century, however, many Americans began to feel that life had gone soft, that material comforts&-many of them made possible by Edison's own inventions&-were eroding character, that the individual could no longer make his voice heard above the drone of the mass society as he could in the good old days when pastoral values were still supreme. Accordingly, the author notes that the mythic image of Edison changed: The young Tom Edison was seen as the All-American Boy (the spunky Tom Sawyer, the handy Tom Swift) who by his own efforts and perseverance overcame great odds to achieve adult success&-the self-made man who didn't forget where he came from and retained his social consciousness&-the rugged individualist who had to struggle in the laboratory and in life, but who, on his own, made a difference and had more than 1000 patents to prove it. The book concludes by suggesting that the Edison legacy has now shifted from the myth to the man himself and that &"the man who remains is finally greater than the myth.&" The author interprets Edison from today's perspective as the real and symbolic figure who led us from the First into the Second Industrial Revolution in which communication overtook transportation and the consumer outstripped the producer in status. Edison and his dynamo &"stand as transitional symbols between the brute snort of the locomotive and the soft dissonance of the computer.&"

A timely rags-to-riches story, The Merchant of Power recounts how Sam Insull--right hand to Thomas Edison--went on to become one of the richest men in the world, pivotal in the birth of General Electric and instrumental in the creation of the modern metropolis with his invention of the power grid, which still fuels major cities today. John Wasik, awarded the National Press Club Award for Consumer Journalism, had unprecedented access to Sam Insull's archives, which include private correspondence with Thomas Edison. The extraordinary fall of a man extraordinary for his time is revealed in this cautionary tale about the excesses of corporate power.

The extraordinary, unknown story of two giants of American history—Henry Ford and Thomas Edison—and their attempt to create an electric-powered city of tomorrow on the Tennessee River During the roaring twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be ten times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society, introducing mass commuting by car, use a new kind of currency called “energy dollars,” and have the added benefit (from Ford and Edison's view) of crippling the growth of socialism. The whole audacious scheme almost came off, with Southerners rallying to support what became known as the Ford Plan. But while some saw it as a way to conjure the future and reinvent the South, others saw it as one of the biggest land swindles of all time. They were all true. Electric City is a rich chronicle of the time and the social backdrop, and offers a fresh look at the lives of the two men who almost saw the project to fruition, the forces that came to oppose them, and what rose in its stead: a new kind of public corporation called the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal. This is a history for a wide audience, including readers interested in American history, technology, politics, and the future.