Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Edison was arguably the most famous man in the world when he died in 1931, so revered for his perfection of the incandescent light bulb that President Hoover proposed darkening the entire United States for one minute on the night of his funeral. For the rest of the twenieth century, Edison's image--polished by his additional fame as the inventor of the phonograph, the Kinetoscope moving-picture camera, and the rechargable alkaline battery--solidified into marble, cold to the touch and impossible to penetrate. The man who once was jovial flesh, overwhelmingly charismatic despite the handicap of deafness, the lover of two wives and father of six children, the mogul who built up no fewer than 120 companies, the creator of the world's first research and development park, is now little understood, even though his name is still one of the most cited in the history of science and technology.Edmund Morris has spent seven years exploring the prodigious, five-million-page archive of papers preserved under a bombproof concrete shell at the inventor's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey--an archive supplemented by thousands of audio and film records and artifacts. In the process he has not only resurrected Edison, literarily speaking, as a human being, but as a polymath of staggering variety - Edison the botanist, the naval strategist, the iron miner, the chemist and telegrapher and audio producer and publisher. From age twelve onward, Edison was an open floodgate of what he modestly called "new things," inventing the electric pen, the carbon telephone transmitter, the X-ray fluoroscope, the world's first film studio, earbuds, "talkie" movies, voice-activated motors, audio mail, the miner's safety lamp, a night telescope, tornado-proof houses, quadruplex telegraphy, and countless other innovations.This extraordinary new biography is a full portrait of a towering figure in American history, written by one of our most accomplished and respected biographers.NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER . From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris comes a revelatory new biography of Thomas Alva Edison, the most prolific genius in American history.NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time . Publishers Weekly . Kirkus ReviewsAlthough Thomas Alva Edison was the most famous American of his time, and remains an international name today, he is mostly remembered only for the gift of universal electric light. His invention of the first practical incandescent lamp 140 years ago so dazzled the world-already reeling from his invention of the phonograph and dozens of other revolutionary devices-that it cast a shadow over his later achievements. In all, this near-deaf genius ("I haven't heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old") patented 1,093 inventions, not including others, such as the X-ray fluoroscope, that he left unlicensed for the benefit of medicine.One of the achievements of this staggering new biography, the first major life of Edison in more than twenty years, is that it portrays the unknown Edison-the philosopher, the futurist, the chemist, the botanist, the wartime defense adviser, the founder of nearly 250 companies-as fully as it deconstructs the Edison of mythological memory.EdmundMorris, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, brings to the task all the interpretive acuity and literary elegance that distinguished his previous biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Ludwig van Beethoven. A trained musician, Morris is especially well equipped to recount Edison's fifty-year obsession with recording technology and his pioneering advances in the synchronization of movies and sound. Morris sweeps aside conspiratorial theories positing an enmity between Edison and Nikola Tesla and presents proof of their mutually admiring, if wary, relationship.Enlightened by seven years of research among the five million Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780812983210

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