It has been said of Edison that his inventive gifts consisted of 1% genius
and 99% hard work. Israel, coauthor of Edison's Electric Light and managing
editor of the Thomas Edison Papers (in progress), in effect confirms that
assessment. Weighing the competing demands of biographical narrative and
technological elucidation, he opts for the latter, showing Edison as
tireless experimenter rather than inspired wizard. Israel portrays Edison
as an improver of inventions and transformer of concepts into products,
someone who applied himself pragmatically to the uses of electricity from
the telegraph and telephone and storage battery to the phonograph,
incandescent light and motion picture. Israel shows Edison as a manager
of innovation, making the shift from private workshop to corporate research
and development with income from royalties. An effective self-publicist,
he became in the public mind the central figure of 19th-century invention.
He lived, however, into 1931, by which time his brand of empiricism had
given way to industrial laboratories on a scale he could not have imagined
as a teenage telegrapher in the 1860s. For a flesh-and-blood life one must
return to such biographies as Robert Conot's A Streak of Luck (1970) or
Neil Baldwin's recent Edison: Inventing the Century. But Israel draws on
his subject's notebooks to provide an authoritative look into Edison's
working methods, here leavened by enough personal detail to give the
achievements shape. When Edison died, the nation extinguished its lights
for a minute in tribute. He had not invented either, but he had made
electricity work as no one else had.

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