Edison thought if he attached a needle to that metal bottom, he could record his words’ vibrations on a soft surface. From the start, Menlo Park was both unique and controversial.Įarly one morning in 1877, in his newly established lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, he was playing with a diaphragm-a cup-shaped device with a thin metal bottom, which vibrated as Edison shouted into it. And yet Edison seems to have done just that. To create something entirely new is practically impossible. Most inventions adapt previous breakthroughs: From the steam engine to the iPhone, crucial advances have resulted from a tweak of a tweak of a tweak. Barely pubescent, Edison was already combining the twin skills that would make him world-famous: a natural talent for earning money and an innate compulsion to invent.Ī second myth that Morris swats away is the notion that Edison was a mere popularizer of other people’s work-a businessman who didn’t really invent anything. Nearly all of this haul went to buying equipment for electric and chemical experiments. By the age of 13, Edison had built a one-boy business selling fruits, groceries, and newspapers that netted $50 a week-the equivalent of an $80,000 annual salary today. But under his mother’s tutelage, he read steadily and voraciously. He did bounce in and out of various schools in Ohio and Michigan, frustrating teachers in his early years. First, like various other men who share the “genius” epithet-see: Einstein, Picasso, Jobs-Edison is sometimes portrayed as a beautiful mind that emerged from the chrysalis of childhood awkwardness. Morris’s book is not built as a revisionist biography-more on its strange architecture in a moment-but it usefully demolishes several myths that have accreted around Edison’s legacy in recent years. Yet his most important idea wasn’t something anybody could patent or touch. He was a workaholic whose final résumé boasted 1,093 patents and countless inventions-including the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the alkaline battery, the X-ray fluoroscope, and the carbon-button microphone. He was a showboating maestro of public relations, but he often turned down invitations and celebrations that would force him to leave his laboratory. He built the world’s first film studio, yet had little interest in movies as entertainment. Morris’s baroquely detailed portrait presents an Edison motivated by money from his midwestern boyhood onward, who didn’t care for the trappings of wealth. In a new effort to sum up the protean figure-a seven-year undertaking by the biographer Edmund Morris, who died in May-Edison emerges as a giant containing multitudes. Depending on whether you incline to a reverential or a revisionist perspective, Edison (1847–1931) was a genius or a thief, a hero of American capitalism or a monster of greed, history’s greatest technologist or a hall-of-famer in the competitive category of overrated American white guys. But his inner ear was so sensitive that he could dazzle sound engineers by pinpointing subtle flaws in their recordings, such as a squeaky flute key among the woodwinds.Ī nearly deaf curmudgeon who birthed the recorded-music industry is just one of the extraordinary contradictions that define Edison, whose reputation has tended to oscillate wildly. He couldn’t hear at the highest frequencies, couldn’t stand vocal vibrato, and declared Mozart’s music an affront to melody. Edison’s approach to music consumption had curious side effects, beyond the visible bite marks all over his phonographs. From there they would pass through the cochlea and into the auditory nerve, which would ferry the melody to his prodigious brain. To appreciate a delicate tune emanating from a music player or piano, he would chomp into the wood and absorb the sound waves into his skull. The inventor of the phonograph was completely deaf in one ear and could barely hear in the other, the result of a mysterious affliction in his childhood. Thomas Alva Edison listened with his teeth.
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