Download The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World AudioBook Free
At the level of his fame, Thomas Alva Edison was hailed as "the Napoleon of technology" and blazed in the public imagination as a electronic demigod. Newspaper publishers proclaimed his genius in glowing personal profiles and quipped that "the physician has been called" because the fantastic man "has not created anything since breakfast time." Starting with the first public presentations of the phonograph in 1878 and extending through the introduction of incandescent light, ability generation and a distribution system to preserve it, and the first film video cameras - all successes more astonishing in their time than we can certainly understanding today - Edison's name became emblematic of all the wonder and offer of the growing age of technological marvels. But as Randall Stross makes clear in this critical biography of the person who is probably the most globally famous of most Americans, Thomas Edison's best invention might have been his own super star. Edison was certainly a technical genius, but Stross excavates the person from levels of myth-making and separates his true successes from his almost similarly colossal failures. How much credit should Edison receive for the many inventions that have popularly been attributed to him - and how many of them resulted from both inspiration and the perspiration of his rivals and even his own assistants? How much of Edison's technical skill helped him get over a lack of business acumen and feel for consumers' needs and needs? This striking reassessment of Edison's life and career answers these and many other important questions while revealing the storyplot of how he came upon his most well-known inventions as a man and put in the remainder of his long life aiming to conjure similar success. We also meet his lovers and challengers, presidents and entertainers, his close friend Henry Ford, the wives who competed along with his improve his attention, and the kids who tried to prosper in his shadow - all providing a fuller view of Edison's life and times than has have you been offered before. The Wizard of Menlo Park reveals not only how Edison performed, but how he supervised his own fame, becoming the first great super star of the present day age.
