Edison And The Rise Of Innovation

Chronicles the life and work of the inventor through primary and previously unseen sources, including personal and business correspondence, photographs, drawings, advertising materials, and lab notebooks.

This is the story of the "other" Thomas Edison—not the heroic lone inventor, but Edison the businessman, industrialist, and successful manager of one of the world's largest industrial research laboratories. Tracing his career from his boyhood to his death in 1931, Edison and the Business of Innovation reveals Edison to be an entrepreneur of extraordinary vision. From extensive research in the Edison archives at West Orange, New Jersey, Andre Millard presents new information about Edison the businessman and provides new interpretations of old issues.

This book develops a systematic approach to the role of failure in innovation, using the laboratory notebooks of America's most successful inventor, Thomas Edison. It argues that Edison's active pursuit of failure and innovative uses of failure as a tool were crucial to his success. From this the author argues that not only should we expect innovations to fail but that there are good reasons to want them to fail. Using Edison's laboratory notebooks, written as he worked and before he knew the outcome we see the many false starts, wrong directions and failures that he worked through on his way to producing revolutionary inventions. While Edison's strengths in exploiting failure made him the icon of American inventors, they could also be liabilities when he moved from one field to another. Not only is this book of value to readers with an interest in the history of technology and American invention, its insights are important to those who seek to innovate and to those who employ and finance them.

Elihu Thomson was a late-nineteenth-century American inventor who helped create the first electric lighting and power systems. One of the most prolific inventors in American history, Thomson was granted nearly 700 patents in a career spanning the 1880s to 1930s.

With 1,093 U.S. patents to his credit, Thomas Edison was one of history's most prolific and influential inventors. His Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey, laboratories pioneered industrial research and produced the first phonograph, practical incandescent electric lamp, and motion picture camera. Edison was also an entrepreneur who created dozens of companies to market his inventions, and he played important roles in the creation of the electric power, sound recording, and motion picture industries. Edison was also one of the first modern celebrities. The 200 photographs in this book, selected from the Edison National Historic Site archives, portray Edison's long career, from his earliest experiences as a railroad newspaper vendor and telegrapher in the 1860s to his last important research project in the late 1920s, a search for domestic sources of natural rubber. These photographs provide revealing glimpses as well of his family life and personal friendships.

Thomas A. Edison and the Modernization of America is a captivating narrative which chronicles America's most formidable inventor and contributor to modern technology. Martin Melosi creates a dynamic historical narrative by relating Edison's personal history to larger cultural, political and economic trends. Melosi adeptly reveals the workings of Edison's mind as well as his inventions' lasting affect on the nation. Historians have often designated robber barons and large trusts as the face of the rapid economic and technological advances of the Gilded Age. However, this book exposes students to a more refreshing look at America's economic history, placing the inventor above the banker. The titles in the Library of American Biography Series make ideal supplements for American History Survey courses or other courses in American history where figures in history are explored. Paperback, brief, and inexpensive, each interpretive biography in this series focuses on a figure whose actions and ideas significantly influenced the course of American history and national life. In addition, each biography relates the life of its subject to the broader themes and developments of the times.

This book is a celebration of ideas: how they happen and their sometimes unintended results. Johnson shows how simple scientific breakthroughs have driven other discoveries through the network of ideas and innovations that made each finding possible. He traces important inventions through ancient and contemporary history, unlocking tales of unsung heroes and radical revolutions that changed the world and the way we live in it

A compilation of 3M voices, memories, facts and experiences from the company's first 100 years.