Edison: A Biography by Matthew JosephsonReview by: F. Garvin DavenportThe American Historical Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Apr., 1960), pp. 636-637Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1849674 .

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636 Reviews of Books

EDISON: A BIOGRAPHY. By Matthew Josephson. (New York: McGraw-l-hill Book Company. c. 1959. Pp. xii, 5II. $6.95.)

A COMPETENT biography of Thomas Alva Edison has been needed for some time. Hundreds of articles, books, and pamphlets have been written about "the electrical wizard," but most of them were popular in style, distorted by myth and hero worship. Even the authorized biography by F. L. Dyer, T. C. Martin, and W. H. Meadowcroft (first edition I9IO, revised edition I929) was incomplete and uneven in value. Matthew Josephson has made an ambitious effort to set the record straight. The result is a biography that is dignified, detailed, and ob- jective, sprinkled with moments of humor, pathos, and drama. It is obvious that the author is a student of American history, and he has taken pains to set the Edison story within the proper historical frame. The westward movement, prob- lems of transportation and communication, the growing technology, the patent wars, and the great industrial movement are all fitted into the backdrop against which the major actor, Edison, plays out his long, complicated, and creative role.

From the broad panorama of Edison's career one fact stands out above all others: his passionate dedication to his main objective in life, which was to exploit his talents to hasten the advancement of commerce and industry. His pioneering laboratory at Menlo Park was set up and operated with the sole purpose of pro- ducing practical inventions that he thought the world needed. Contrary to the legend, Edison worked not alone, but with a team of mechanics, machinists, chemists, and physicists, many of them as dedicated to him as he was to his work. It seems obvious that the Edison laboratory was the prototype of the industrial research laboratories of a later day.

Many pages of the biography are devoted to the activities, experiments, dis- appointments. and triumphs associated with the maior Edison inventions. A select list of these would include the quadruple, "one of the most important contribu- tions to the telegraphic art," the mimeograph machine, a microphone, the phono- graph. an industrial storage battery, an electric locomotive, dynamos, the motion picture machine, and along with the incandescent lamp an entire electrical system to be used in lighting communities. Edison's research methods were mainly em- pirical, but the results were rewarding not only to technology but to pure science as well. During the long period wvhen he pondered the problems related to his electric system, he read files of scientific journals and scholarly proceedings, a research technique that was overlooked by critics who claimed that he was an uneducated mechanic. The story of the development of the incandescent bulb and the multiple circuit and generator to go with it indicates that Edison proceeded according to scientific methods as understood in the i88o's.

One of the chief virtues of this book is the care taken by the author to build up a realistic picture of Edison the man. In this way, Edison the legend is con- siderably modified, but the person of the inventor who emerges, etched against a

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Ma): End of Ainerican Innocence 637

background of fact, is more interesting and vital than the legendary figure steeped in half-truths and fanciful imagination. This new portrait is based on a solid foundation of rich and varied sources. Of these, the most important are the papers, notebooks, and documents in the Edison Laboratory Archives, used here for the first time.

Monmouth College F. GARVIN DAVENPORT

THE END OF AMERICAN INNOCENCE: A STUDY OF THE FIRST YEARS OF OUR OWN TIME, 1912-1917. By Henry F. May. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1959. Pp. xv, 412, XVii. $5.75.)

A BRIEF chapter of American intellectual history evidently got lost somewhere between the climax of progressivism and the crisis of the First World War. Drowned out by noisier events, its positive achievements were associated with an earlier or a later era and its destructive effects with the war or the disillusion- ment that followed. Most of its significant attributes have been identified in the popular mind as well as in academic thought with the twenties. Professor May's study undertakes to restore the lost identity of a period and establish for it the dis- tinction claimed by a later epoch, that of being "the first years of our own time."

May has less difficulty establishing an end than in fixing a beginning to his period. April 1917 is an acceptable enough terminus, but I9I2 is more arbitrary as a starting point, as the author's frequent backtracking into the previous decade would seem tacitly to admit. Even so, he finds good reasons for maintaining that the old order remained intact in 1912, even though its central doctrines had al- ready been brought under fire. Those doctrines were the certainty of moral values, the inevitability of progress (especially in America), and the importance of tradi- tional culture.

One of several significant contributions the book makes is a delineation of the traditional order against which the rebels revolted: its strongholds among the universities, publishing houses, and magazines; its outposts and frontiers in West and South; its "custodians of culture," Henry Van Dyke, Hamilton W. Mabie, William Lyon Phelps; and its "central donjon," the National Academy of Arts and Letters. The complacency, optimism, and outmoded assumptions of the day, as May says, "provided the rebels with an unparalleled collection of sitting ducks."

There were European antecedents, American forerunners since the nineties, and there was William James, "the man who came nearest bringing together the old and the new." Scoffers, doubters, and libertarians softened up resistance, and shock troops carried the Armory Show in 1913. The crest of the prewar wave of revolt was reached in 1915, the year "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was published in Poetry, the Provincetown Players was established, Spoon River An- thology appeared, and Van Wyck Brooks's Amer7'ca's Coming of Age was pub- lished. By 1917 The New Republic, Seven Arts, Masses, and The Little Review

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