The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, vol. 2: From Workshop to Laboratory, June 1873–March 1876 ed. by Robert A. Rosenberg, et al

Abstract

696 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tion yet may come when historians delve into the biological thought of 17th-century farmers and appraise it against modern science. G. Terry Sharrer Dr. Sharrer is curator of agriculture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, vol. 2: From Workshop to Laboratory, June 1873-March 1876. Edited by Robert A. Rosenberg, Paul B. Israel, Keith A. Nier, and Melodie Andrews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Pp. xlviii + 842; illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, index. $75.00. In the first volume of this projected twenty-volume series, the editors observed that their subject “is among the small pantheon of national heroes that includes Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln” (1989, l:xxviii) and effectively made the case for granting him a large niche in that imagined temple. They nevertheless lamented the Edison image in the popular mind, that of the grandfatherly wizard of invention, and promised that their volumes would “challenge traditional interpretations of his epochal position in world history” (l:xxix). The range and variety of the earliest documents, enhanced by thoughtful selection of period illustrations and by annotation, set a high standard for the series. In this second volume, however, the problems presented by Edison’s papers are more visible, the editors’ treatment of them less successful. Unlike the political figures in the American pantheon, Edison put little of himself into the written word. His few surviving letters and personal papers from these three years convey mostly facts and instructions, often in cadences that resemble telegraph messages. The editors compensate for this by printing patent, legal, and business papers, pertinent third-party correspondence, periodjournal articles, and newspaper accounts. Photographs of patent models are pre­ sented as visual documents; more than a hundred line drawings and accompanying notes (few with laboratory data) chronicle Edison’s experiments (the original notebooks are reproduced in the compan­ ion Thomas A. Edison Papers: A Selective Microfilm Edition: Part 1 (1850—1878), ed. Thomas E. Jeffrey et al. [Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1984]). Most of the nearly 400 documents published in volume 2 derive from the huge Edison archive at the Edison National Historical Site, West Orange, New Jersey, from patent and court records held in the National Archives and Federal Archives and Records Centers, and from printed sources. Edison’s success and uniqueness had much to do with his near obsession with electricity and relentless drive to subjugate it to perform work—as a young man he traversed the microworld of electri­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 697 cal circuits with the same observation, concentration, and daring he exhibited as a boy when he first took the controls of a railroad engine (pp. 782—83). But he was as much technologist as practical scientist— his “spatial thinking” took in the full scope of a problem. He clearly understood the dilemma of the telegraph industry in its third decade of rapid growth in the simplistic (single message) Morse mode and responded to its near-desperate need to reduce the costs of lines and operators. He required no financial guru to foresee the rewards that awaited the inventor who could provide the superior technology for transmitting multiple telegraphic messages over a single line. Other electrical devices he worked on during these years—notably the district telegraph (household and office message) system, the inductorium (a medical machine for delivering therapeutic electrical shocks), and the electric-pen copying system—demonstrate his alert­ ness to the everyday world and his awareness of the enormous potential of electricity for transforming it, even in mundane ways. Unfortunately, the editors of this volume have given that culturalspatial dimension slight notice in their commentary and annotation, choosing to concentrate on technical and scientific matters. Because The Papers of Thomas A. Edison is such an important scholarly undertaking, it is worth noting that this second volume in the series, however welcome, falls short of the properly ambitious historiograph­ ical goals that have been set for the edition. The editors’ attention to “technical creativity” (l:xxii—xxiii) enriches Edison studies, but by confining their search for it to the laboratory, their emphasis has the effect of reinforcing the traditional but...