Edison’s Electric Light: Biography of an Invention by Robert Friedel, et al

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 153 Edison’s Electric Light: Biography of an Invention. By Robert Friedel and Paul Israel with Bernard S. Finn. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Pp. xvi+263; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). In the space of four years, from October 1878 to September 1882, Thomas Edison, with the help of able associates and wellequipped laboratories, created the essential elements of modern elec­ tric lighting systems. High-resistance, incandescent lamps in parallel circuits, constant-voltage dynamos, and a feeder-and-main system of distribution—all were unthought of before Edison began his cam­ paign to produce an electric lighting system that would supersede gas lighting systems—are still components in the generation, distribu­ tion, and consumption of electric power. This book, the joint work of Robert Friedel and Paul Israel, with brief interchapter essays by Bernard Finn, provides, as the authors are at pains to tell us, a more thorough history of those four years than any yet published. It is based chiefly on systematic research in the Edison archives in West Orange, New Jersey—research guided by “true probing questions asked about the act of invention itself’ (p. xi) that have “rarely” been asked by previous scholars. Nearly a dozen inventors were working on incandescent lamps dur­ ing the 1870s. Edison entered the field with characteristic vigor in the fall of 1878. He first made a filament of fine platinum wire that would become incandescent in open air when attached to a battery. To avoid melting the platinum, Edison added a thermostatic switch to interrupt the current when the incandescent platinum reached a specified temperature. Within a week of his first experiments, Edison announced in typically bombastic fashion that he had solved the problem of electric light and that once patents were secured he would make his invention public, after which gas lighting would rap­ idly be discarded. He immediately formed a company to obtain Wall Street money for research and development. He soon found “bugs” (his word) in his lamps, and a year later he was slowly and laboriously removing those bugs. His first major change was to put the platinum filament in an evacuated glass bulb. Next, he realized that his lamps should have high electrical resist­ ance, a requirement evident only by hindsight. In the fall of 1879, he tried to make a filament of carbon, and by the end of December he had succeeded in illuminating his Menlo Park laboratory and grounds with more than fifty carbon-filament lamps. Special trains brought numerous visitors from New York to see the welladvertised spectacle. When the lamp worked satisfactorily, Edison developed, in the same uncertain way as his lamp, the other components he would need to light a section of lower Manhattan. The several related inven­ tions have been described by others but never with specific evi­ 154 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE dence to show that Edison’s contributions were revolutionary, not merely incremental, improvements. Even so, the reader must make a special effort to apprehend Edison’s originality, so familiar have his inventions become and so difficult is it to imagine alternatives. Even the screw-in socket for light bulbs was an Edison innovation. We have here as detailed an account of a series of “acts of inven­ tion” as I have seen anywhere. Furthermore, sufficiently varied evi­ dence enables the reader to make independentjudgments regarding the topics treated. The authors squeezed everything they could from the volumi­ nous laboratory notebooks. Seventy-four notebook pages are repro­ duced, along with fifty other illustrations. All are placed close to the text they support or illuminate, and captions are full and inform­ ative. Unfortunately, laboratory notebooks, and indeed all technical drawings, are ambiguous unless (a) the reader is familiar with that particular kind of apparatus and (b) a verbal explanation clarifies the questions that the drawing leaves ambiguous. Despite the wealth of primary sources, the authors can tell us lit­ tle about the crucial steps of an invention. Their knowledge is never quite sufficient to explain how and why Edison reached a par­ ticular conclusion. How did the importance of high resistance hap­ pen to...