Overview

This richly illustrated volume explores Edison's inventive and personal pursuits from 1888 to 1889, documenting his responses to technological, organizational, and economic challenges. Thomas A. Edison was received at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle-the World's Fair-as a conquering hero. Extravagantly feted and besieged by well-wishers, he was seen, like Gustave Eiffel's iron tower, as a triumphal symbol of republicanism and material progress. The visit was a high-water mark of his international fame. Out of the limelight, Edison worked as hard as ever. On top of his work as an inventor, entrepreneur, and manufacturer, he created a new role as a director of research. At his peerless laboratory in Orange, New Jersey, he directed assistants working in parallel on multiple projects. These included the perfected phonograph; a major but little-recognized effort to make musical recordings for sale; the start of work on motion pictures; and improvements in the recovery of low-grade iron ore. He also pursued a public War of the Currents against electrical rival George Westinghouse. Keenly attuned to manufacturing as a way to support the laboratory financially and control his most iconic products, Edison created a new cluster of factories. He kept his manufacturing rights to the phonograph while selling the underlying patents to an outside investor in a deal he would regret. When market pressures led to the consolidation of Edison lighting interests, he sold his factories to the new Edison General Electric Company. These changes disrupted his longtime personal and professional relations even as he planned an iron-mining project that would take him to the New Jersey wilderness for long periods. The ninth volume of the series, Competing Interests explores Edison's inventive and personal pursuits from 1888 to 1889, documenting his responses to technological, organizational, and economic challenges. The book includes 331 documents and hundreds of Edison's drawings, which are all revealing and representative of his life and work in these years. Essays and notes based on meticulous research in a wide range of sources, many only recently available, provide a rich context for the documents.

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9781421440118

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Reviews

A mine of material... Scrupulously edited... No one could ask for more... A choplicking feast for future Edison biographers--well into the next century, and perhaps beyond. --Washington Post A triumph of the bookmaker's art, with splendidly arranged illustrations, essential background information, and cautionary reminders of the common sources on which Edison's imagination drew. --New York Review of Books Beyond its status as the resource for Edison studies, providing a near inexhaustible supply of scholarly fodder, this series... will surely become a model for such projects in the future... The sheer diversity of material offered here refreshingly transcends any exclusive restriction to Edisonia. --British Journal for the History of Science For those who want to delve deeply into Edison's life and business dealings, this is another essential key to the puzzle. --The Antique Phonograph His lucidity comes through everywhere... His writing and drawing come together as a single, vigorous thought process. --New York Times In its superabundance of detail--steely facts and figures, great plates of text riveted with nouns and graffitied with cryptic drawings (Edison was an untrained but natural draftsman)--the book has the same kind of physical impact as that which stuns you when you enter his laboratory in West Orange, N.J. --New York Times Book Review In the pages of this volume Edison the man, his work, and his times come alive... A delight to browse through or to read carefully. --Science Those interested in America's technological culture can eagerly look forward to the appearance of each volume of the Edison Papers. --Technology and Culture What is most extraordinary about the collection isn't necessarily what it reveals about Edison's inventions... It's the insight into the process. --Associated Press

Author Information

Paul B. Israel is the director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University. Louis Carlat and Theresa M. Collins are associate editors and Alexandra R. Rimer and Daniel J. Weeks are assistant editors of the project.

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