Edison The Inventor, Edison The Showman

This article was adapted from The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World, by Randall Stross, a contributor to The New York Times. The book, to be published on Tuesday by Crown Publishers, examines the reality and the myths surrounding the Edison legacy.

Reporters and editors from The Timess Sunday Business section offer perspective on the week in business and beyond.

An advertisement for Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1899 was geared toward the upper class. But other Edison ads were intended to draw in the middle class.

THOMAS ALVA EDISON is the patron saint of electric light, electric power and music-on-demand, the grandfather of the Wired World, great-grandfather of iPod Nation. He was the person who flipped the switch. Before Edison, darkness. After Edison, media-saturated modernity.

Well, not exactly. The heroic biography we were fed as schoolchildren does have its limitations, beginning with the omission of other inventors who played critical roles — not just Edisons gifted assistants, but also his accomplished competitors. Whats most interesting about the standard Edison biography that we grew up with is not that it is heroic but that it is outsized, a projected image quite distinct from the man who stood 5-foot-9.

Edison is famously associated with the beginnings of movies, which is where the modern business of celebrity begins. But he deserves to be credited with another, no less important, discovery related to celebrity that he made early in his own public life, accidentally: the application of celebrity to business.

No one of the time would have predicted that it would be an inventor, of all occupations, who would become the cynosure of the age. In retrospect, fame may appear to be a justly earned reward for the inventor of practical electric light in 1879 — yet Edisons fame came before light. It was conferred two years earlier, for the invention of the phonograph. Who would have guessed that the announcement of the phonographs invention was sufficient to propel him in a matter of a few days from obscurity into the firmament above?

After Edison became a household name, he would pretend that nothing had changed, that he was as indifferent as ever. But this stance is unconvincing. He did care, at least most of the time. When he tried to burnish his public image with exaggerated claims of progress in his laboratory, for example, he demonstrated a hunger for credit unknown in his earliest tinkering. The mature Edison, post-fame, is most appealing whenever he returned to acting spontaneously, without weighing what action would serve to enhance his public image.

One occasion when Edison cast off the expectations of others in his middle age was when he met Henry Stanley, of Dr. Livingston, I presume fame, and Stanleys wife, who had come to visit him at his laboratory in West Orange, N.J. Edison provided a demonstration of the phonograph, which Stanley had never heard before. Stanley asked, in a low voice and slow cadence, Mr. Edison, if it were possible for you to hear the voice of any man whose name is known in the history of the world, whose voice would you prefer to hear?

Napoleons, replied Edison without hesitation.

No, no, Stanley said piously, I should like to hear the voice of our Savior.

Well, explained Edison, You know, I like a hustler.

Edison had retained the patent rights and business stakes in the phonograph, so when the business came into its own, he approved the construction of expanded manufacturing facilities adjacent to his laboratory to handle the orders that poured in. This was followed by still more growth, and more building: an entire block adjacent to the laboratory was filled with five-story hulks. By 1907, as the company erected its 16th building, Edison boasted of the largest talking machine factory in the world.

Edison and his copywriters courted the urban middle class with advertising that made prospective customers feel as entitled to enjoy the pleasures of recorded music as anyone. When the king of England wants to see a show, they bring the show to the castle and he hears it alone in his private theater. So said an advertisement in 1906 for the Edison phonograph. It continued: If you are a king, why dont you exercise your kingly privilege and have a show of your own in your own house.

Other advertisements developed the theme of the phonograph as the great leveler. In 1908, a man in formal wear and his slender wife stood on one side of a table, upon which sat a phonograph; on the other side stood four servants, wearing smiles and expressions of curiosity. The caption said the Edison phonograph had brought the same entertainment enjoyed by the rich within the range of all. The credit for making the phonograph the great popular entertainer was to be bestowed upon Thomas Edison. He made it desirable by making it good; he made it popular by making it inexpensive. Another advertisement promised that the phonograph would amuse the most unresponsive, adding reverently, It is irresistible because Edison made it.

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