Book Review: The Wizard of Menlo Park
This book showed Edison for the person he was. A brilliant inventor, a stubborn personality, a terrible businessman, and the hardest working person of his era. His fortunes rose and fell many times over as success raising money for one venture would turn into business disaster the following years. He had a terrible habit of over promising on what he had built and what his inventions could do. This caused him and his research lab tremendous stress in trying to make his inventions live up to the claims he told reporters.
Without a doubt his biggest asset was his name. He was one of the first celebrities in the current sense of the word. A larger than life personality that was a household name all across America. His early start in the world of telegraphs led him to approach sending voice down the same channels and towards the creation of the phonograph (which he viewed as a dictation device for secretaries). The fact that a human voice could be reproduced by a machine was so novel and so extraordinary that people imbibed Edison with supernatural abilities. His creation of a long-lasting electric light-bulb the following year sealed his reputation.
I would argue that he spent the rest of his life trying to live up to that two-year period of unbelievable creation of two eventual billion-dollar industries. He experimented with film and mining and several other areas but never really kept focus long enough to see any invention through to true commercial success.
