The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Conventional histories of the late nineteenth century generally miss one man who helped bring about changes in American society far more lasting than those wrought by any politicians or businessmen. The histories tend to name men like President Grover Cleveland, Populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and financier J. P. Morgan as the most influential of the era.

Thomas Alva Edison is placed apart from the mainstream of history. He invented the light bulb and the phonograph, improved the telegraph, telephone and movie projector, and developed a system for distributing electrical power to homes and businesses over broad areas. But most who survey American history view Edison as an eccentric anomaly, and leave his life and work to the historians of wizardry or of science. Conventional histories deal with technological development as though it were an independent force, growing without any influence from the men who in fact produced it. But to ignore an inventor as part of a larger force is no more valid than ignoring a president because his actions are largely determined by political forces or ignoring a businessman because his ways are mainly set by laws of economics.

Ronald W. Clark writes about scientists who have impacted history, but whom history has often overlooked. About five years ago he produced a well-written and well-received tome on the life and times of Albert Einstein. This year he has done the same with Edison: The Man Who Made the Future. Edison is a difficult subject to tackle. Much has already been written about him; Clark's biography was preceded by at least a dozen others. Clark could have written a valuable book if he had taken the time to analyze Edison's importance in American history, to provide some new insight into the man's life.

But Clark doesn't. What could have been a book filling an important gap in the story of America's industrialization and urbanization in the late 1800s becomes instead a long collection of trivia and anecdotes. This new Edison biography is fine as source material for those who are interested in finding out details about the life of an important inventor, but it will not offer much interesting material to those with only a passing interest in the history of technology.

Edison's life does entail some inherently interesting history--young Tom growing up in the Midwest during the Civil War, selling newspapers and printing one of his own; Edison the insomniac telegraphist; Edison the eccentric inventor; Edison the occasional businessman. But Clark's book is only interesting to the extent that Edison's life was interesting. Thoughtful analysis is largely left behind after the first half dozen pages, and the book becomes a string of information bits, arranged loosely in chronological order. The only logic connecting the information presented is the immediately obvious: what happened when. Clark rarely steps back to try to examine the forces that influenced Edison's work, or the influence Edison's work had on the conduct of American life.

It is easy to categorically state that money was the prime motivating factor driving men to create machines that would link the fate of each part of the country to that of the whole--the original railroad, the telegraph, the telephone and all their updated versions. Edison, certainly, was driven by a cause larger than money. He was an experimenter of prodigious energy, diving headlong into every problem that presented itself. He worked so hard at inventing that he rarely had time to spend the money he made, except on lab equipment or perhaps a new house. For Edison, money was simply a sign that his inventions were working. He once told a young colleague, "Whatever you do, Sammy, make a brilliant success of it or a brilliant failure. Just do something. Make it go."

Clark's book is neither a brilliant success nor a brilliant failure. His research is impressive, but he doesn't think very hard about what he has dug up. Clark continually and annoyingly relies on quotes to supply the book's only colorful observations about Edison's personality and his image. It is Edison's words, not Clark's, that provide the reader with a sense of the danger of the inventor's headlong rush to "make it go." Clark quotes Edison when he decided to relocate his lab in New Jersey saying, "See that valley? Well, I'm going to make it more beautiful. I'm going to dot it with factories."

Edison forgot there is a corollary to the question of whether or not it will go; the question of where it will go. An analogous narrowness afflicts Edison's latest biographer. He sprays facts at his readers, but he doesn't stop to think about where the book as a whole leads. As a result, it goes nowhere.