THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 75
founders of the Chautauqua Institu-
tion. She and Edison had three chil-
dren of their own, and the family moved
to West Orange, New Jersey, where Ed-
ison built another laboratory. This new
complex improved on the already as-
tounding pace of invention at Menlo
Park and greatly expanded Edison’s
manufacturing capacity. “I will have the
best equipped & largest Laboratory ex-
tant,” he bragged in a letter, “and the
facilities incomparably superior to any
other for rapid & cheap development
of an invention.” He wanted to be able
to “build anything from a ladys watch
to a Locomotive,” and employees were
soon working, in separate teams, on
alkaline batteries, sound recordings,
fluoroscopes for medical radiography,
a device that measured infrared radia-
tion, motion-picture cameras and pro-
jectors and the pictures themselves, and
anything else that Edison thought he
could market.
Like tech C.E.O.s today, Edison at-
tracted an enormous following, both
because his inventions fundamentally
altered the texture of daily life and be-
cause he nurtured a media scrum that
fawned over every inch of his labora-
tory and fixated on every minute of his
day. Newspapers covered his inventions
months and sometimes years before
they were functional, and journalist after
journalist conspired with him for bet-
ter coverage; one writer even arranged
to co-author a sci-fi novel with him. A
recent book by Jeff Guinn, “The Vag-
abonds” (Simon & Schuster), chroni-
cles the publicity-seeking road trips that
Edison took with Harvey Firestone and
Henry Ford every summer from 1914
to 1924, driving a caravan of cars around
the country, promoting themselves as
much as the automobiles. Edison’s life
had already been thoroughly docu-
mented for the public: the first autho-
rized biography, two full volumes’ worth,
appeared in 1910. All the way up to his
death, twenty-one years later, at the age
of eighty-four, Edison was still making
headlines, even if, by then, his rate of
perfecting had finally slowed.
H
ow many biographers does it take
to change a light bulb? Who
knows, but it takes only one to change
a narrative. Every decade or so, for a
century now, a new book about Edi-
son has appeared, promising to explain
his genius or, more recently, to explain
it away. In the earliest years after his
death, those biographies expanded on
Edison’s personality, revealing the com-
plexities of his family life and his work
habits. He adhered, readers learned, to
the prescriptions of a sixteenth-cen-
tury Venetian crank named Luigi Cor-
naro, drinking pints of warm milk every
few hours and consuming no more
than six ounces of solid food per meal.
He worked fifty hours at a time, and
sometimes longer—including one
stretch of four consecutive days—tak-
ing irregular naps wherever he hap-
pened to be, including once in the pres-
ence of President Warren Harding. His
eating was disordered; his moods di-
sastrous. He was affectionate but ab-
sent-minded with both of his wives
and emotionally abusive with his chil-
dren—one of whom, Thomas, Jr., he
sued in order to stop him from selling
snake oil under the family name.
Edison left behind millions of pages
of notes and diaries and reports, pro-
viding one biographer after another
with new source material to draw on.
Then, a dozen years ago, Randall
Stross, who has written extensively
about Silicon Valley, published “The
Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas
Alva Edison Invented the Modern
World.” Despite its admiring subtitle,
Stross’s book sought to reveal the man
behind the curtain—in his view, a
humbug whose bigotry and bad busi-
ness sense were salvaged only by the
creativity, savvy, and cowardice of his
munchkins, who toiled away on in-
vention after invention for which their
wizard took credit.
That kind of correction was surely
inevitable, given Edison’s status and
the culture’s increasing skepticism
about great men and their ostensible
genius. Although Stross’s book was
not the first to consider Edison’s
faults—Wyn Wachhorst probed his
self-promotion in “Thomas Alva Ed-
ison: An American Myth,” from 1981,
and Paul Israel catalogued his belief
in racial stereotypes and phrenologi-
cal theories in “Edison: A Life of In-
vention,” from 1998—Stross portrays
Edison as a patent-hungry P. T. Bar-
num or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth
Holmes. But that argument is not en-
tirely convincing. Edison’s hype was
not for its own sake; it was to raise
capital, which he rarely held on to for
long, partly because he never was much
of a businessman, and partly because
he only wanted more of it in order to
keep working. Nor were his inventions
“Why didn’t we ever move out while we lived here?”
••
