Thomas A. Edison and the Modernization of America by Martin V. Melosi

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 361 artisanal moral economy. Jervis ordered the assistant in charge of the Croton office to remove from it all “articles that do not belong to it and which only promote confusion. . . . Allow no smoking and no play of any kind in the office” (p. 67). The bare effort to economize on accounts extended directly into the raw materials of style. Lushness was private, like emotion in the family. Similarly, when Jervis de­ fended himself against political charges, his public contempt for any “political Engineer” (p. 89) was of a piece with his rejection of the florid and self-indulgent in engineering operations. Against Jervis’s bare-walls conception should be compared Monte Calvert’s picture of the family resources of early mechanical engi­ neers. Larkin is exactly perceptive on the ironies that lurk in Jervis’s drive for “simplicity.” Other writers may yet give us a more florid, cultural reading of the same record. Daniel Calhoun Dr. Calhoun is retired from the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. Thomas A. Edison and the Modernization ofAmerica. By Martin V. Melosi. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Pp. ix + 221; bibliography, index. Paper. This volume is part of the Library of American Biography, a well-known series suited to teaching undergraduates. Like other books in the series, it contains 200 pages of unfootnoted text and a good ten-page bibliographic essay. It would be unjust to Martin Melosi to compare his book to much longer biographies that were permitted a scope he was denied. Rather, this book’s virtue is that it uses Edison’s life as a focal point for grasping American industrialization and urbanization. Edison is deftly presented here as an inventor and entrepreneur who accelerated the country’s modernization with tele­ graphic inventions, improvements of the telephone, the phonograph, the electric light, and so on, and it also includes failed ventures such as iron mining. Melosi situates each invention in relation to activities of other inventors working in related areas, and he stresses Edison’s continual need for investment capital and his role as a manufacturer for the mass market. While giving Edison precedence, he also stresses the contributions of close associates. Their activities are put into the context of major events from 1860 until 1930, with references to such standard fare as the major world’s fairs, the frontier thesis, the Civil War, the Panic of 1893, the opening of the Panama Canal, and trust-busting. Likewise, Melosi links Edison’s activities to urbaniza­ tion, demonstrating how urban markets shaped his research and manufacturing goals, and how his inventions in turn reshaped the urban environment. He also breaks new ground in an effective 362 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE analysis of the friendship between Edison and Ford that blossomed after 1915. Given the goals of this series, which is edited by Oscar Handlin, the book is a success. It is a boiled-down version of Matthew Josephson’s 1959 biography, amended and updated with the scholar­ ship generated by the ongoing publication of the Edison papers under the editorship of Reese Jenkins. My objections to the book will no doubt recommend it to others. This is very much a public life, which largely avoids Edison’s philo­ sophical and moral speculations. His inventions emerge as purely economic ventures, shorn of other meanings they had for the man whose library included novels and theosophical works as well as chemistry, and whose experiments occasionally veered in the direction of the possibility of thought transference. Melosi’s Edison is almost entirely a compound of economics and technique, and the American society that the book implicitly proposes is a nation driven forward by the cooperation of entrepreneurs and inventors, an assumption no doubt congenial to many readers. The genre of the life-and-times biography virtually dictates the fusion of the public and the private, eliminating or downplaying anomalies in order to achieve a synthesis. Such biographies have fallen into disrepute among many literary scholars, while they are still uncritically accepted by most historians. But if you want a short life-and-times biography of Edison, this is the best book available. David E. Nye Dr...