Charles Edison arranged: “Edison-McGraw Merger Forms Electrical Giant,” NYT, 3 January 1957.
McGraw-Edison was absorbed: “Cooper Industries Inc. Purchase,” Wall Street Journal, 4 June 1985.
poll of Chinese: “In Beijing Students’ Worldview, Jordan Rules,” NYT, 16 June 1998. The results of the survey should not be generalized: the survey population was only one thousand respondents.
Shunpei Yamazaki: Yamazaki’s first patent was filed in 1980, so he passed Edison at a pace that exceeded Edison’s by far. Another prolific inventor, Donald E. Weder, has accumulated more than thirteen hundred without becoming a celebrity. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office provides online access to its patent database at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.htm.
When a young John Lawson: John Lawson to TAE, 6 January 1879, PTAED, D7913B.
One of his employees: A. E. Johnson and K. Ehricke, Oral History, 29 March 1971, ENHS, 20.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE EDITORS OF the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project deserve sanctification. They have brought talent, expertise, and patience to a vast project that is not yet complete: making the corpus of documents that Edison collected during his long life easily accessible to scholars, students, and the general public. The principal repository of Edison’s papers, the Edison National Historic Site, in West Orange, New Jersey, contains an estimated 5 million documents—a rough guess because a complete inventory even now has yet to be completed. Thanks to the Edison Papers Project, however, many tools are available for excavating nuggets from any portion of the collection.
The first five volumes of the projected fifteen-volume set of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison have appeared, and they are modern wonders. I am grateful for the prodigious work that was poured into preparing the introductions, timelines, bibliographies, headnotes, and endnotes, which make them a model of contemporary scholarship.
I also was most fortunate to be able to gain access to nearly 180,000 Edison documents while sitting at home—the Project’s easily searchable Web site came online shortly before I began my research. What a boon!
I would like to singly thank Paul Israel, the current director of the Edison Papers Project; former director Robert Rosenberg; and staff editors Theresa Collins and Brian Shipley, all of whom provided assistance to me in the course of research.
Not all of the Edison papers are yet available online. I would like to thank Leonard DeGraaf, Doug Tarr, and other staff members at the Edison National Historical Site for their help when I paid my visits to the archives at a busy time, during the year before the site was closed for renovation, as well as when I requested assistance with follow-up requests. I also was assisted by the staff of the Benson Ford Research Center at the Henry Ford, the new umbrella name encompassing the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Michigan.
The College of Business of San Jose State University gave generous, recurring gifts in the form of reduced teaching assignments, as well as financial support for a full year’s leave. During the book’s seven-year gestation, San Jose State administrators and faculty colleagues displayed imperturbable patience, at least in my presence, for which I am most appreciative.
The scholarly resources of Stanford University contributed much to the project. I am grateful for visiting scholar appointments over two years arranged by James Sheehan, chair of the department of history, and Tim Lenoir, director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science. At Stanford’s Archive of Recorded Sound, Richard Koprowski and Aurora Perez provided cheerful help.
Madeleine Sloane and David Sloane met with me and generously shared memories of their paternal grandmother, Madeleine Sloane, née Edison, and family lore.
My interlibrary loan requests were voluminous and must have created grievously lopsided accounts between borrowing and lending libraries. But Mary Munill, at Stanford, and Kara Fox and Shirley Miguel, at San Jose State, were unstinting in their work on my behalf.
Bonnie Newburg, of the Edison & Ford Winter Estates, and Ruth Ann Nyblod, of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, provided swift help with my queries. Jack Curlin supplied information about his grandfather that tied up a loose end. Martin Sheehan-Stross helped with library research.
The manuscript was much improved by the unsparing critiques supplied by Gail Hershatter and Pamela Basey, who flagged inconsistencies and forced me to look anew at the most basic assumptions embedded in the first draft.
As always, my agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, knew what I needed at any given point—a matter of intuition, as I often did not know myself until her assistance appeared.
At Crown, Emily Loose was extremely knowledgeable about Edison and this period of history; her enthusiasm for the project fired my own. Her successor, Luke Dempsey, has unusually sharp ears as well as eyes and gave the manuscript a gloriously old-fashioned close reading. I am grateful to both.
Jim Gullickson made countless corrections in the course of careful copy-editing. Lindsey Moore kept us all on schedule.
This work is dedicated to my most important collaborator, Ellen Stross. Her editorial suggestions made the book immeasurably better—and considerably shorter.
ALSO BY RANDALL STROSS
eBoys
The Microsoft Way
Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing
Bulls in the China Shop
The Stubborn Earth
Technology and Society in Twentieth-Century America (ed.)
Copyright © 2007 by Randall E. Stross
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
All photos unless otherwise noted: Courtesy of U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stross, Randall E.
The Wizard of Menlo Park: how Thomas Alva Edison invented the modern world / Randall E. Stross.
1. Edison, Thomas A. (Thomas Alva), 1847–1931. 2. Inventors—United States—Biography. 3. Electric engineers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
TK140.E3S76 2007
621.3092—dc22
[B] 2006028808
eISBN: 978-0-307-39456-9
v3.0
The Wizard of Menlo Park Page 43
