Edison's Electric Light: The Art of Invention

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS WITH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

201 a note from the authors with acknowledgments When we began working on Edison’s Electric Light in 1980, we were undertaking “an experiment in archival historiography” designed to produce both a more accurate and a richer account of Edison ’s most famous inventive project through a close reading of the full documentary record. In this we largely succeeded. Those who have written about Edison’s work on electric lighting have relied on it as the primary account even as they have sought to elaborate on specific points and themes. (See, for example, Neil Baldwin’s Edison : Inventing the Century, Mark Essig’s Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Life and Death, Paul Israel’s Edison: A Life of Invention, Jill Jonnes’ Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse , and the Race to Electrify the World, and Walter G. Vincenti ’s, “The Technical Shaping of Technology: Real-World Constraints and Technical Logic in Edison’s Electrical Lighting System” in Social Studies of Science 25 [Aug. 1995].) Even the close reading given to the documents by the Thomas A. Edison Papers project at Rutgers University in Volumes 4–6 of its book edition, The Papers of Thomas A. Edison (ed. Paul Israel and Louis Carlat, et al.), has not fundamentally altered the story we tell. Because our work has stood the test of time, this new edition has only some minor changes in the text. These are primarily drawn from the work of the Edison Papers, which has provided additional details on some specific technical aspects of Edison’s work. These include such issues as his early understanding of high resistance (Chapter 2), his changing understanding of the role of lamp regula- 202 A Note from the Authors tors (Chapter 3), and the role that his “electric light law” played in the spiral design of filaments (Chapter 3). In conducting our original study we were following the lead of Eugene Ferguson and Brooke Hindle, who were urging historians of technology to pay close attention to the ways in which “nonverbal communication”wereanessentialpartoftechnicalculture(EugeneS. Ferguson, “The Mind’s Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology,” Science, no. 197; Ferguson, “Elegant Inventions: The Artistic Component of Technology,” Technology and Culture 19; Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention). Indeed, our own understanding of the inventive process at Edison’s Menlo Park Laboratory was based to a large extent on the notebook sketches, calculations, finely detailed drawings, and other documents produced by Edison and his staff in the laboratory and machine shop. In order to convey the process of invention we therefore decided to reproduce key and representative technical documents to supplement our text and to suggest the wealth of nonverbal sources that are such an important part of the documentary record. The reader of this new edition will find that the most significant change we have made is to include only a few of these illustrations on the printed page. We have added, however, the ability to access these and additional documents online through the digital editions of the Edison Papers (see “Making the Best Use of This Book” at the end of the Preface). !@ This work began as a study commissioned by the U.S. National Park Service’s Edison National Historic Site (now Thomas Edison National Historical Park) on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent electric light. It owes its inspiration, as well as much material support, to the Site and to the capable and dedicated individuals in whose care lie the treasures of Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory and home. Over several years of work, this study has been very much a cooperative endeavor, in which the authors have shared the labors A Note from the Authors 203 (and the fun) of every aspect of the enterprise. It is fitting, however, to note the fundamental division of labor reflected in the final product . The many months of intensive research in the Edison archives at West Orange was the work of Paul Israel, whose position with the Thomas A. Edison Papers—a project at Rutgers University to edit Edison’s papers in microfilm, book, and digital editions—has allowed him to continue over the years to make the best use of the riches of those archives as this work moved forward. The text and interpretive framework in which it is set were the work of Robert Friedel. The impetus for our efforts...