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Technology and Culture 42.3 (2001) 600-601



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Book Review

The Papers of Thomas A. Edison. Vol. 4, The Wizard of Menlo Park, 1878


The Papers of Thomas A. Edison. Vol. 4, The Wizard of Menlo Park, 1878. Edited by Paul B. Israel, Keith A. Nier, and Louis Carlat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. xlvii+919. $75.

The appearance of another volume of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison has become an event eagerly anticipated by historians of electrical technologies and the process of technological innovation more generally. This volume will not disappoint them. Through the publication of 487 letters, technical notes, notebook entries, and other documents, the staff of the Edison Project has illuminated the most important single year in Edison's life. It was the year he became a public figure of superhuman proportions--the "Wizard of Menlo Park," as the press dubbed him. In a single year, Edison developed the phonograph and the carbon telephone transmitter and initiated his campaign to solve the problems of electric lighting.

Scholars familiar with the earlier three volumes will find the format familiar. Instead of a general introduction, there is a fairly detailed chronology and short introductions to each of the eight chronological sections. The first four sections cover two months each, and the period from September through the end of the year is broken up into one-month segments. Also included are a calendar of all documents in the volume and four appendices.

I found the annotations somewhat more informative than in the previous volume. Space limitations in volume 3 had led to the discarding of contextual annotations to allow for the inclusion of references to the vast documentation not included in the printed edition. Although the annotations are still relatively lean in this volume, the editors do provide some context. The annotations accompanying document 1315--a notebook entry consisting of Edison's eight "axioms"--are a good example. There are six editorial headnotes. Five introduce drawings or photographs of major technological innovations for different forms of the phonograph and the first rigid-diaphragm telephone transmitter. The sixth is a very brief discussion of Edison's relations with the press. [End Page 600]

Users of the earlier volumes of the Edison Papers know that the great contribution of this project to the practice of documentary editing is the integration of pictorial material, as documents, part of documents, or annotations. For example, document 1416 is a collection of five photographs of the "Standard Model Exhibition Tinfoil Phonograph." Only in the history of technology would an artifact be considered a document by an editorial project. Technical drawings, with accompanying text when it is present, are included among the documents. The editors have also used technical drawings and photographs in the annotations, whether because a particular photograph was mentioned in a letter or because the annotation seemed to demand it.

Volume 4 repeats two aspects of its predecessor that I found detrimental. To save a few pages, the editors (or perhaps the publisher) chose not to reprint the editorial policy as set out in earlier volumes. Instead, the reader is told only of changes from the practices in the first three. This is a special inconvenience for readers who do not happen to have access to the earlier volumes. Moreover, the editors have once again silently passed over the issue of selection. Any scholar familiar with the Edison Papers knows that this volume contains only a tiny percentage of the totality of extant Edison documents for the year. Some users might find it valuable to know what was missing and how the selection was made.

The selection policy of editors can be revealing of their historiographic slant, their perception of the edition's primary audience, and their conception of how the book edition complements, in the case of the Edison Papers, the microfilm and on-line editions. As more and more material is included in the Edison Papers Project website, the relationship among the various products of the project becomes a serious question. I wish...

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