Why edison died

Who knows, but it takes only one to change a narrative. Every decade or so, for a century now, a new book about Edison has appeared, promising to explain his genius or, more recently, to explain it away.

He adhered, readers learned, to the prescriptions of a sixteenth-century Venetian crank named Luigi Cornaro, 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—taking irregular naps wherever he happened to be, including once in the presence of President Warren Harding.

His eating was disordered; his moods disastrous. He was affectionate but absent-minded with both of his wives and emotionally abusive with his children—one of whom, Thomas, Jr. Edison left behind millions of pages of notes and diaries and reports, providing one biographer after another with new source material to draw on.

Barnum or, perhaps, a proto-Elizabeth Holmes. But that argument is not entirely convincing. Nor were his inventions fake, even if they were sometimes impractical or borrowed from other people.

So, too, was the drudgery. Unlike his onetime employee and sometime rival Nikola Tesla, Edison insisted that answers came not from his mind but from his laboratory. Nobody does. In that conviction, Edison was, perhaps, ahead of his time. Three decades after Edison died, the sociologist Robert 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 concurrently; or Charles Darwin and Alfred 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.

The problems of the age attract the problem solvers of the age, all of whom work more or less within the same constraints and avail themselves of the same existing 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 inventing 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 phonograph, but his failure to recognize the demand for lower-quality, more affordable audio recordings meant that he quickly lost the market to the makers of the Victrola.

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.

He reminds us that there was a time when a five-second kinetoscopic 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 nineteenth-century TikTok. Allowing the dead to speak is also what biographies do. To support that narrative voice, Morris created additional characters, staged scenes that never happened, and fabricated footnotes to corroborate the counterfeited material.

When critics assailed his approach, Morris defended 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. Some argued that, to one extent or another, all biography is just historical fiction in more respectable packaging. Life within each section is still lived forward—Part 1 starts in and runs until , Part 2 goes from to , 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 founding, in New Jersey; the inventor is completely deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other for six hundred pages before we find out that he lost most of his hearing by age twelve from an unknown cause.

Morris gestures toward a better one, by titling each section with a discipline in which Edison distinguished himself: each backward-marching decade is matched to botany, defense, chemistry, magnetism, light, sound, telegraphy, or natural philosophy. But a backward biography, while certainly an invention, is, as Edison might have pointed out, neither practical nor profitable.

It contains little new material, good prose but far too much of it, and no novel argument or fresh angle to motivate such an exhaustive return to an already storied life. He first became interested in invention when at eight years he discovered what propelled a locomotive.

He next became fascinated by chemistry after trying an experiment described in a text book. He was permitted without formal permission to go ahead with his tests until one day a Jerk of the train shook a tube of phosphorus from its rack and set the car on fire.

This annoyed the baggageman and he cuffed Edison's ears—an-act which some early biographers say resulted in his partial deafness. Edison for a time went into Journalism as a career. It was the only paper known to have been written and published on the train. He gave tins up, however, when a passenger threw him into the St. Clair river because of an objectional item. Tills led Edison to make his first invention. It worked flawlessly until he was caught sleeping and dismissed.

From then on through the years his inventions or improvements on inventions came with rapidity. That gave him his first real stake—it was on Sept. A toy built purely to amuse his assistants led him to invent the phonograph. The idea of bottling electricity for illumination purposes challenged Edison. He and his workmen started out to create an electric light that would burn Indefinitely within a glass bulb.

On Oct. He succeeded in carbonizing a length of cotton sewing thread which, when placed in an airtight glass bulb, burned for 40 hours. Governor Leland Stanford of California, in order to prove his contention that a running horse landed all four feet on the ground simultaneously had a photographer set up 40 cameras In a row and.

He was right. He finally devised a workable machine in Moved by patriotism, he worked more strenuously than at any time in his life.

Numerous devices to aid the country in its war came from his laboratory. He bacame head of the naval consultation board and directed the work of producing many new- implements of war In recent years he sought a substitute for rubber, working on it until his death. Edison was married twice, his first wife dying in Thomas Alva. He married the prsent Mrs.

Edison, the former Miss Mila Miller, two years later. Charles is the! Edison did more than any other man to make this world an easier, pleasanter, better world to live in. But others have tended to discount this as the sole cause of his hearing loss. A hyperactive child, prone to distraction, he was deemed "difficult" by his teacher.

His mother quickly pulled him from school and taught him at home. At age 11, he showed a voracious appetite for knowledge, reading books on a wide range of subjects. In this wide-open curriculum Edison developed a process for self-education and learning independently that would serve him throughout his life.

At age 12, Edison convinced his parents to let him sell newspapers to passengers along the Grand Trunk Railroad line.

Exploiting his access to the news bulletins teletyped to the station office each day, Edison began publishing his own small newspaper, called the Grand Trunk Herald. The up-to-date articles were a hit with passengers. This was the first of what would become a long string of entrepreneurial ventures where he saw a need and capitalized on the opportunity. Edison also used his access to the railroad to conduct chemical experiments in a small laboratory he set up in a train baggage car.

During one of his experiments, a chemical fire started and the car caught fire. The conductor rushed in and struck Edison on the side of the head, probably furthering some of his hearing loss. He was kicked off the train and forced to sell his newspapers at various stations along the route. While Edison worked for the railroad, a near-tragic event turned fortuitous for the young man. By age 15, he had learned enough to be employed as a telegraph operator.

For the next five years, Edison traveled throughout the Midwest as an itinerant telegrapher, subbing for those who had gone to the Civil War. In his spare time, he read widely, studied and experimented with telegraph technology, and became familiar with electrical science.

The night shift allowed him to spend most of his time reading and experimenting. He developed an unrestricted style of thinking and inquiry, proving things to himself through objective examination and experimentation. Initially, Edison excelled at his telegraph job because early Morse code was inscribed on a piece of paper, so Edison's partial deafness was no handicap.

However, as the technology advanced, receivers were increasingly equipped with a sounding key, enabling telegraphers to "read" message by the sound of the clicks. This left Edison disadvantaged, with fewer and fewer opportunities for employment.

In , Edison returned home to find his beloved mother was falling into mental illness and his father was out of work. The family was almost destitute. Edison realized he needed to take control of his future. Upon the suggestion of a friend, he ventured to Boston, landing a job for the Western Union Company. At the time, Boston was America's center for science and culture, and Edison reveled in it.

In his spare time, he designed and patented an electronic voting recorder for quickly tallying votes in the legislature. However, Massachusetts lawmakers were not interested. As they explained, most legislators didn't want votes tallied quickly.

They wanted time to change the minds of fellow legislators. In Edison married year-old Mary Stilwell, who was an employee at one of his businesses. During their year marriage, they had three children, Marion, Thomas and William, who himself became an inventor.

In , Mary died at the age of 29 of a suspected brain tumor. Two years later, Edison married Mina Miller, 19 years his junior. In , at 22 years old, Edison moved to New York City and developed his first invention, an improved stock ticker called the Universal Stock Printer, which synchronized several stock tickers' transactions.

With this success, he quit his work as a telegrapher to devote himself full-time to inventing. By the early s, Edison had acquired a reputation as a first-rate inventor.