EDISON: HIS LIFE AND INVENTIONS

by FRANK LEWIS DYER, GENERAL COUNSEL FOR THE EDISON LABORATORY AND ALLIED INTERESTS and THOMAS COMMERFORD MARTIN, EX-PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS

Amazingly, because of him, there is light on this world....... Thomas Edison.

"....These volumes aim to be a biography rather than a history of electricity, but they have had to cover so much general ground in defining the relations and contributions of Edison to the electrical arts, that they serve to present a picture of the whole development effected in the last fifty years, the most fruitful that electricity has known. The effort has been made to avoid technique and abstruse phrases, but some degree of explanation has been absolutely necessary in regard to each group of inventions. The task of the authors has consisted largely in summarizing fairly the methods and processes employed by Edison; and some idea of the difficulties encountered by them in so doing may be realized from the fact that one brief chapter, for example,--that on ore milling-- covers nine years of most intense application and activity on the part of the inventor. It is something like exhibiting the geological eras of the earth in an outline lantern slide, to reduce an elaborate series of strenuous experiments and a vast variety of ingenious apparatus to the space of a few hundred words...."

Contents included:
The Age of Electricity
Edison's Pedigree
Boyhood at Port Huron, Michigan
The Young Telegraph Operator
Arduous Years in the Central West
Work and Invention in Boston
The Stock Ticker
Automatic, Duplex, and Quadruplex Telegraphy
The Telephone, Motorgraph, and Microphone
The Phonograph
The Invention of the Incandescent Lamp
Memories of Menlo Park
The World-Hunt for Filament Material
Inventing a Complete System of Lighting
Introduction of the Edison Electric Light
The First Edison Central Station
Other Early Stations - The Meter
The Electric Railway
Magnetic Ore Milling Work
Edison Portland Cement
Motion Pictures
The Development of the Edison Storage Battery
Miscellaneous Inventions
Edison's Method in Inventing
The Laboratory at Orange and and Staff
Edison in Commerce and Manufacture
The Value of Edison's Inventions to the World
The Black Flag
The Social Side of Edison

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