Giver of Light

EDISON (511 pp.)--Matthew Josephson--McGraw-Hill ($6.95).

Thomas Alva Edison's pet hates were "small-brained" capitalists and "bulge-head" professors. He disliked capitalists because they never put enough money into his proliferating inventions, and professors because they ridiculed his nearly total ignorance of algebra. Said Edison: "I can hire mathematicians at $15 a week, but they can't hire me."

Edison became the world symbol of Yankee ingenuity and looked and acted the part. Moonfaced, with a lock of hair flopping across his brow and a plug of chewing tobacco in his cheek (instead of a spittoon, he would spit on the floor "because you can't miss it"), Edison had acid-stained hands, an explosive vocabulary and a pioneer's instinct for practical jokes. He spouted the slogans of agrarian radicals, railed at U.S. colleges for stuffing students with "Latin, Philosophy and all that ninny stuff," and fiercely defended his agnostic opinions.

He was a trial to nearly everyone, his parents included. Born in 1847 in Milan, "Ohio, the infant Thomas had a head so abnormally large that the family feared he might be "defective." His cantankerous, freethinking father tried to beat sense into young Tom with a birch switch that was used so often the bark was worn off. His mother was more hopeful, and it was her reading to him from a scientific primer that started Edison on a lifetime of experimentation.

By the Ears. The family skated on the edge of poverty. When it moved to Port Huron, Mich., twelve-year-old Tom got a job as a news and candy butcher on the daily train to Detroit. The conductor let him build a tiny laboratory in a corner of the baggage car, and Tom fiddled with test tubes, chemicals and batteries. One morning, his arms full of newspapers, Tom tried to swing on to the departing train. He would have fallen under the wheels if a trainman had not hauled him aboard by the ears. Something "snapped" in the boy's head, and his deafness may have started at that moment. Years later, Edison wrote: "I haven't heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old."

But he could hear distinctly the click and clatter of telegraph keys, and Tom Edison left home at 16 for the wandering life of the 19th century telegrapher. During the Civil War and the years of the Reconstruction, Edison drifted from Ontario to Tennessee, living in poor boardinghouses and working in shabby Western Union offices, where he rigged up devices to electrocute roaches and rats. When he was 22, Edison landed in New York without a cent. He borrowed a dollar and got a job with a company that manufactured primitive stock tickers. As a repairman, Edison witnessed the 1869 Wall Street panic, when the "Erie Railroad Ring" tried to corner the nation's gold supply. As the crowd surged wildly about him--a prominent banker went mad and had to be restrained by five men--Edison shook hands with a colleague, commented later: "I felt happy because we were poor."

Scoured World. Edison was never to be that poor again. He was soon making stock tickers on order for Western Union. For the rest of his life, the inventions poured forth: a mimeograph machine, the carbon transmitter that made the telephone practical, the incandescent electric light, the movie camera and the phonograph--probably the only one of his inventions that was indisputably Edison's own. He applied for as many as 141 patents in a single year, and there were failures among them. But he was as good a publicist as Barnum, knew how to grab headlines away from rival inventors, as well as whet the appetite of investors. With newspaper fanfare he once sent three explorers off to scour the world ,for rare bamboo that he had no special need for.

As Edison grew older, he grew more bullheaded. He refused to switch his lighting system from direct current to alternating current, even though it was demonstrably better. He clung tenaciously to a wax cylinder for his phonograph while Victor and Columbia moved past him with their disks. In a complicated financial deal, the Edison General Electric Co. was swallowed by a smaller rival (Thomson-Houston Co.), and his name was dropped. When that happened, said his secretary, "something died in Edison's heart."

Correct Stumble. The Edison heart had rarely been in family matters. His first wife was a pretty, gentle-mannered Newark girl named Mary Stilwell, who bore him three children and died of typhoid fever; his second wife was handsome Mina Miller, an heiress from Akron who had nearly as strong a personality as his own and who gave him three more children. He was an absent-minded father, and when he did notice the children, it was usually to tease them unmercifully. His real life was in his laboratories, from the small one at Menlo Park to the vast establishment in West Orange, N.J.

Surrounded by a cluster of old associates and hordes of workmen, Edison tackled nearly all his problems in the same way: a painstaking testing of every conceivable substance until the correct one was stumbled upon. When someone sympathized with his lack of progress in a difficult inquiry, Edison said: "Why, man, I've got lots of results. I know several thousand things that won't work."

Author Josephson's biography moves along briskly enough, although it is studded with unaccountable errors of fact (e.g., three in one nine-line footnote). But the book's assessment of Edison seems accurate. It suggests that, while he was not the world's greatest inventor, he was unquestionably a man who got things done. Example: when he began his tinkering with the electric light, the boulevards of Paris were already illuminated by flaring electric arc lights invented by the Russian Paul Jablochkoff. Edison's genius lay in his ability to see all facets of a problem; he produced not only an efficient carbon filament lamp but an entire electrical system to go with it--from generators down to the distribution grid that supplied current for the individual lamps.

His empirical style was deeply shared by his associates. The flavor of the man and his time was caught by George Bernard Shaw, who worked briefly for an Edison company in London in 1879 and whose novel, The Irrational Knot, had an Edisonian hero. Edison's American employees, said Shaw, were "free-souled creatures, excellent company; sensitive, cheerful and profane; liars, braggarts and hustlers." Every one of them, Shaw noted, "adored Mr. Edison as the greatest man of all time in every possible department of science, art and philosophy."

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