Historical Figures: Edison: His Life and Inventions (PDF)

Prior to this book's original publication in 1910, no complete, authentic, and authorized record of the work of Mr. Edison had been given to the world. The authors deemed themselves happy in the confidence reposed in them, and in the constant assistance they enjoyed from Mr. Edison while preparing these pages, a great many of which are altogether Mr. Edison's own. The cooperation in no sense relieved the authors of responsibility as to any of the views or statements of their own that the book contains. They realized the extreme reluctance of Mr. Edison to be made the subject of any biography at all; but he felt that, if it must be written, it were best done by the hands of friends and associates of longstanding, whose judgment and discretion he could trust, and whose intimate knowledge of the facts would save him from misrepresentation. These pages were designed to bring the reader face to face with Edison; to glance at an interesting childhood and a youthful period marked by a capacity for doing things, and by an insatiable thirst for knowledge; then to accompany him into the great creative stretch of forty years, during which he had done so much. This book shows him plunged deeply into work for which he always had an incredible capacity, reveals the exercise of his unsurpassed inventive ability, his keen reasoning powers, his tenacious memory, and his fertility of resource. It follows him through a series of innumerable experiments, conducted methodically, reaching out like rays of search-light into all the regions of science and nature, and finally exhibits him emerging triumphantly from countless difficulties bearing with him in new arts the fruits of victorious struggle.