Selected Responses to Paul Israel's
Edison: A Life of Invention
I found Israel's biography of Edision to be very detailed and
enlightening. In the past, I had read another Edison biography which
tended to keep situations simple and paint hin in a much more ideal,
almost heroic light.
Coming from a science/engineering background, I greatly appreciated
the inclusion of such authentic sketches of Edison's ideas for new
devices in Israel's biography. For me, this gave his account a sense
of authenticity, whether it was completely accurate or not. When you
talk about a scientist, what better way to describe him but by his own
ideas, for this is how the scientist sees how the world could be. In
doing so, the author lets us see through Edison's eyes.
Israel obviously has exhaustive knowledge of his primary sources, and
it is this meticulous attention to detail that really makes this book
stand out.
In particular, Israel sets his aim at the idea of Edison as lone
inventor, disinterested or even contemptuous of science. He discusses
the particular institutions that Edison created to support his
inventing; technical laboratories, commercial ventures, from
partnerships to corporations, and social networks.
Unfortunately, this book also displays the limitations of biography as
a genre. By necessity and definition, the organizing theme of this
book is Edison's life, and its scope is Edison's experiences. This
then means that any themes that are raised really only get discussed
in the context of Edison's life, rather than explored to their
fullest.
I found this book irritatingly disjointed. The material about
Edison's inventions, companies, public image and family life could,
and should, have been much more tightly integrated. The picture of
Edison that emerges is of a man who led a number of lives, with few
interconnections.
While at first glance this seemed to be more a narrative of
Edison's life, the author did appear to have a number of key
arguments. Some of these might be described as the evolution of team
research and development, the dedication of the team leader, the role
of corporations in funding research, and the particularly American
practical understanding of inventions as useable products.
This would be a great reference book if one ever needed to explain
how a particular object was developed, or why an innovation was not
successful (apparently an interesting area but one for which I do not
have to strength of character to endure!). I was left wanting more
analysis and contextual discussion, with the epilogue a suggestion of
what I would have preferred.
as I began to read I was struck by how Israel wove together the
personal and professional sides of Edisons life. At first I was
curious as to why methodologically the enormous detail about his
private life and childhood was included at all outside of the mere
voyeuristic tendency of biographies.
Here the emergence of some technology is part of a personal
narrative, and I found myself asking: why do we care that inventions
have inventors?
I'm also interested in the way Israel portrays Edison's role in the
evolving relationship between science and technology.
David Noble laid out three approaches of conceiving technology:
technology as knowledge, technology as a force, and technology as a
process. Paul Israel's book on Edison provides another perspective:
technology as a specific type of practice.
How does Israel avoid falling into the outmoded category of the
"great man's history"? In one sense, he does not.
The uniqueness of this book compared to many other works
on history of technology, I think, is to illustrate how the
engineering of innovation worked by carefully tracing the path of
actual practices of an inventor-engineer, be the elements in such a
path technical, social-economic, or cultural.
We have been discussing the question of "why history of
technology, why not history" in the previous classes. Israel's book on
Edison might give us a clue. History of technology may gears a focus
rather different from history if it pursues technology in terms of
practices instead of forces or social processes.
Edison did not invent any devices related to indoor plumbing.
This I can understand and accept. But he must have used these devices
at one time or another! Why do we see none of that?
Israel's biography of Edison does a good job of relating the
inventions that were made by Edison and his colleagues to Edison's
personal working and thinking habits.
Israel makes a strong case for the importance of Edison as the
inventor of a particular way of working--as the inventor of industrial
research--and shows how he instead came to be perceived as the last in
a line of untutored empirically-oriented genuises.
Ultimately, I didn't find the biography as compelling as I might
have. I think that biography must be a difficult genre to write
because of the overwhelming temptation to put everything into strictly
chronological order, with a description of the protagonist's ancestors
in the first chapter and a description of his or her funeral and
impact in the last.