76 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
fake, even if they were sometimes im-
practical or borrowed from other peo-
ple. And he didn’t hide the borrow-
ing: like Santa’s elves, the muckers were
always a part of the mythology.
So, too, was the drudgery. Edison
not only rhymed “perspiration” with
“inspiration”—he also talked endlessly
about his experiments and trials, em-
phasizing just how much work went
into every discovery. Unlike his one-
time employee and sometime rival Ni-
kola Tesla, Edison insisted that an-
swers came not from his mind but
from his laboratory. “I never had an
idea in my life,” he once said. “My so-
called inventions already existed in
the environment—I took them out.
I’ve created nothing. Nobody does.
There’s no such thing as an idea being
brain-born; everything comes from
the outside.”
In that conviction, Edison was, per-
haps, ahead of his time. Three decades
after Edison died, the sociologist Rob-
ert K. Merton put forward a theory
concerning simultaneous invention, or
what he called multiple discoveries:
think of Newton and Leibniz coming
up with calculus independently but con-
currently; or Charles Darwin and Al-
fred Russel Wallace thinking their way
to natural selection at nearly the same
time; or inventors in Spain, Italy, and
Britain sorting out steam engines within
a few decades of one another. In Mer-
ton’s terms, “multiples” are more com-
mon than “singletons,” which is to say
that discovery and invention are rarely
the product of only one person. The
problems of the age attract the prob-
lem solvers of the age, all of whom work
more or less within the same constraints
and avail themselves of the same exist-
ing theories and technologies.
Merton provides a useful context
for Edison, who, as he himself knew,
was never inventing ex nihilo; rather,
he was nipping at the heels of other
inventors while trying to stay ahead of
the ones at his. It may be satisfying to
talk of Alexander Graham Bell invent-
ing the telephone, but Elisha Gray
filed a patent for one on the same day,
and Edison improved on both of their
designs. Similarly, we may safely refer
to Edison as the inventor of the pho-
nograph, but his failure to recognize
the demand for lower-quality, more
affordable audio recordings meant that
he quickly lost the market to the mak-
ers of the Victrola. Stross makes much
of that failure in his biography, but
consumer markets are hardly the only,
and rarely the best, measure of ge-
nius—a point made clear, and pain-
fully so, by Edison’s preference for and
optimism about electric cars. It seems
odd to judge Edison negatively for
making fuel cells before their time, or
for trying to find a viable domestic
source for rubber, even if, on those
fronts, he never succeeded.
The delight of Edmund Morris’s
“Edison” is that, instead of arguing with
earlier writers or debating the terms
of genius, it focusses on the phenom-
enological impact of Edison’s work. He
tries to return readers to the techno-
logical revolutions of the past, to cap-
ture how magical this wizard’s work
really felt. He reminds us that there
was a time when a five-second kine-
toscopic record of a man sneezing was
just about the most astonishing thing
anyone had ever seen; people watched
it over and over again, like a nine-
teenth-century TikTok. And he makes
plain the cosmological significance of
Edison’s phonograph—how, against all
understandings of human imperma-
nence, it allowed the dead to go on
speaking forever. “Here now were
echoes made hard,” Morris writes, “re-
sounding as often as anyone wanted
to hear them.”A
llowing the dead to speak is also
what biographies do. And “Edi-
son” does it doubly, because it is the
last book that Morris finished before
his death, earlier this year, at age sev-
enty-eight. Morris’s first book, “The
Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” won both
the National Book Award and the Pu-
litzer Prize after it was published, in
1979, but it was his second book that
really caused a stir. The success of Mor-
ris’s Roosevelt biography was shortly
followed by the election of Ronald Rea-
gan, and, after the Inauguration, the
new Administration courted him to be
the President’s official scribe.
Morris spent fourteen years work-
ing on a book that he ultimately pub-
lished under the confused title of
“Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Rea-
gan.” Devoured by the public, scornedby the academy, debated by the Bos-
wells of the world, the book featured
a fictional narrator, who claimed to
have known the fortieth President since
they were teen-agers. To support that
narrative voice, Morris created addi-
tional characters, staged scenes that
never happened, and fabricated foot-
notes to corroborate the counterfeited
material. It was easy to assume that the
invented voice belonged to Morris him-
self, since the “I” of the book expresses
frustration about holding off on a
planned trilogy on Teddy Roosevelt in
order to write about Dutch Reagan.
But many of the details contradicted
those of Morris’s own life. When crit-
ics assailed his approach, Morris de-
fended himself on the ground that he
had found Reagan too boring for a
standard biography, then later claimed
that his performative style had been
mimetic of his subject, a performer
whose entire Presidency, he suggested,
had been an act.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong
with an artist of the court adding him-
self to the portrait, as Diego Velázquez
did in “Las Meninas.” Morris’s trans-
gressions lay first in making things up
and second in failing to disclose what
he was doing. His critics found those
actions disqualifying in a biography;
his champions found “Dutch” formally
innovative. Some argued that, to one
extent or another, all biography is just
historical fiction in more respectable
packaging.
There is a faint echo of that formal
tomfoolery in “Edison,” which begins
with the inventor’s death and then takes
a turn for the Benjamin Button. Mor-
ris moves backward through the de-
cades of Edison’s life; like Merlin, this
wizard ages in reverse. Life within each
section is still lived forward—Part 1
starts in 1920 and runs until 1929, Part 2
goes from 1910 to 1919, and so on. The
whole thing has the halting feel of two
steps forward, one step back: Edison
has a second wife before we ever learn
what happened to the first; Menlo Park
has already been disassembled and
re-created as a museum in Michigan
before we get the story of its found-
ing, in New Jersey; the inventor is com-
pletely deaf in one ear and half deaf
in the other for six hundred pages be-
fore we find out that he lost most of