TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 155 could also be made available as a relational data base on a CD-ROM disc, the wave of the future for the study of the past. Patrick Malone Dr. Malone teaches at Brown University. The Papers ofThomas A. Edison. Vol. 1: TheMaking ofan Inventor: February 1847—June 1873. Edited by Reese V. Jenkins et al. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Pp. lxviii + 708; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $65.00. The publication of this volume marks a milestone in what is probably the largest project in the historiography of technology in the 20th century. Established in 1978 at Rutgers University, the Edison Papers Project plans on producing a six-part selective microfilm edition of about 10 percent of the estimated 3'/2 million pages of documents at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, New Jersey, and a multivolume, annotated book edition of about 1 percent of these papers. Parts 1 and 2 of the microfilm edition appeared in the mid-1980s and covered the period from Edison’s birth in 1847 to 1886. Volume 1 of the book edition deals with his formative years: the transformation of a self-educated, itinerant telegrapher into an accomplished professional inventor, who had already received over fifty patents, mostly in telegraphy, at the age of twenty-six. Because records covering these years are relatively few, the editors have included material from archives other than the Edison National Historic Site. About one-third of the documents in this volume come from such sources as the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michi gan, the corporate archives at Western Union, and federal archives at national records centers. The range of documents includes corre spondence, notebook entries, patent applications, and business and legal records. The mpst innovative part of the volume are photo graphs and descriptions of eleven patent and production models of Edison’s early inventions. These sections remind us that Edison and other inventors “read” artifacts as much as they did the technical journals and performed much of their work in the nonverbal manner pointed out by Eugene Ferguson many years ago. Although the editors have been careful not to impose their inter pretation of Edison on the reader, they have made some intriguing suggestions, particularly the idea that Edison’s systems approach dates to his work on multiple telegraphy (sending more than one message at a time on a wire). Inventors had to think in terms of the entire system in order to master these complicated circuits. The documents support the related point that Edison’s use of visual thinking, analogies, stock solutions, and his habit of working with others in this period set the pattern for his career. 156 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The volume contains some surprises. Although the editors include a large number of drawings Edison made while thinking through an invention, I was surprised to see lengthy comments on many drawings (e.g., in the Newark notebooks). These show an extremely close association between visual and verbal thinking. One verbal tradition, of course, was the endless shoptalk among members of the tele graphic “fraternity.” I was also surprised to see statements by Edison that support the applied-science model of the science-technology relationship. In an 1868 article, he wrote that a “well-known law of magnetism . . . may be taken advantage of in the construction of a self-adjusting relay magnet” (p. 76). Although references to the “laws” of electrophysics are sprinkled throughout this volume, Edison did not state them mathematically but verbally in a form closer to “rule-of-thumb” craft knowledge than precise scientific statements. There is not much here on Edison’s motivations, but parts of letters do lift the curtain on his inner drives. In 1869, after experiencing many disappointments, he told a colleague that “I’ll never give up for I may have a streak of Luck before I die” (p. 128). In a letter home, he bragged about being a “bloated eastern manufacturer” (p. 212), and he wrote in a notebook that a device was “invented for myself exclusively, and not for any small brained capitalist” (p. 317). Other documents describe elaborate business dealings with...