PHOTOGRAPHYBYNICKROMANENKO

Paul Israel—the director andeditor of the Thomas A. EdisonPapers project, a 30-year effortto chronicle, in multiple media,the full scope of Edison’s revo-lutionary work—in the library ofthe Edison National HistoricalPark in West Orange, New Jersey.

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For more than 30 years, Paul Israel has been researching and cataloging the life

of the famous inventor—a gargantuan task that has yielded millions of pages of

documents that shed light on Edison the man, Edison the innovator, and Edison

the marketing genius. Thanks to Israel and his team, the world can get a rare

glimpse of Edison’s many achievements and just how he managed to do it.

By Christopher Hann

Thomas EdisonIn Search of

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t’s dark here, in the back of the old Livingston Theater in Piscataway, within thecramped second-floor office of Paul Israel, the director and general editor of theThomas A. Edison Papers. I’m here to talk with Israel about the three decades he hasspent trying to understand the guy who invented the lightbulb. But in some kind ofcosmic irony, I arrived in the middle of a power failure. So we sit, in the dark.

Israel GSNB’89 can only laugh. He’s a native of California, lanky, with a salt-and-pepperbeard and a Samuel Beckett haircut, and he’s not prone to lose his cool over an electrical sys-tem gone kaput. Besides, as the world’s preeminent expert on the man widely considered theworld’s preeminent inventor, Israel has much to expound on regarding the subject of ThomasAlva Edison, the darkness be damned. “I don’t think there’s anybody who quite compares with Edison,” Israel says. “He was the

first inventor to become an institution. He wasn’t just an inventor; he was a laboratory direc-tor. While the lab worked on his ideas, it allowed him to invent in a diverse number of areas.”Israel had never been east of Utah when he packed his suitcase and flew across the coun-

try in February 1980. He had just completed a master’s degree in public historical studiesfrom the University of California at Santa Barbara and taken a six-month job assisting RobertFriedel, a historian in West Orange, New Jersey, commissioned by the National Park Serviceto study how Edison invented the electric light. Their collaboration resulted in Edison’s ElectricLight: Biography of an Invention (Rutgers University Press, 1986). Israel figured he’d finish thesix months and head back to California. But he was offered another position, as a research assistant with the Thomas A. Edison

Papers at Rutgers, one of the most ambitious editing projects ever undertaken at an Americanuniversity. Part of the School of Arts and Sciences, the Edison Papers project is an attempt tochronicle, in multiple media forms, the full scope of Edison’s revolutionary work. Thirty-plusyears after he began, Israel has become its driving force and public face. Last fall he appearedon the Turner Classic Movies channel during its seven-part series on the history of Americanmotion pictures, an industry that Edison practically founded (he even created two film stu-dios, producing some of cinema’s best-known titles). Israel is the author of Edison: A Life ofInvention (John Wiley & Sons, 1998), a 550-page doorstop of a biography that received acco-lades from the Society for the History of Technology. More recently, he wrote the foreword forThe Quotable Edison (University Press of Florida, 2011), acompilation of interviews, notes, and quotes. “He’s the world’s leading expert on

Thomas Edison—period,” TheresaCollins, an associate editor who’sworked on the Edison Papers for20 years, says of Israel. “He’s aCalifornian—a little SiliconValley, a little Malibu. It’s allthere. Paul works very hard.He sets a high bar. For a teamof people who are equally

Top, a portrait of Thomas A. Edison,circa 1903. Middle, Edison’s filamentlamp, circa 1879. Bottom, a phono-graph cylinder in its original cardboardsleeve with a portrait of Edison, circa1910. Right, the label of an earlyEdison record of “My Sweetie WentAway,” featuring the inventor’s like-ness, circa 1920s.

matched in intelligence, curiosity, and dedication to the proj-ect, it’s amazing how sometimes it could take me four hoursto figure out something that takes him two seconds.” Israel’s work with the Edison Papers has given him

unprecedented insight into the critical methods of innova-tion, marketing, and promotion used by aninventor who seemed to never stop tinkering.Edison accumulated a mind-bending total of1,093 patents in his lifetime, the phonograph,lightbulb, and movie projector among the bestknown. But he also made breakthrough discover-ies with the telegraph, telephone, and stock ticker and laterwith electric cars, concrete houses, and a whole lot more.Israel, having retraced the steps of the great inventor at everytechnological turn, has devoted his entire adult life to dis-covering Thomas Edison.The subject has never failed to fascinate him. Because

Edison toiled in so many technologies and so many indus-tries, Israel’s scholarship has likewise explored one break-through after another. “I never feel like I’m working on oneperson,” Israel says. “Edison is part of a group of people,both in laboratories and businesses, who are constantlyinteracting with whole groups of people in other fields. So

it’s not like I’m entirely in his head all the time, although it’san interesting place to be.”Israel and his staff—four full-time editors, a business

manager, a part-time indexer, two graduate students, twowork-study students, and a volunteer—have pored through

an estimated five million pages of Edisonia: notes; letters;drawings; doodles; invoices; journal entries; legal and finan-cial records; articles from newspapers, magazines, and tech-nical journals; and thousands of pages of correspondencebetween Edison, his six children, and his two wives (his firstwife, Mary Stillwell, died in 1884; he married Mina Millertwo years later).The Edison Papers project is compiling the Edison record

in books and microfilm and on a website, a trove of infor-mation made available to students, scholars, historians—anyone, really, with a pulse and some curiosity. And that’s thepoint. “The big benefit is providing additional access to the

Edison accumulated a mind-bendingtotal of 1,093 patents in his lifetime.

Paul Israel pictured in the chemistry lab at the Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey, holding volume six of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, documenting hisoutput from April 1881–March 1883. “I never feel like I’m working on one person,” Israel says. “Edison is part of a group of people, both in laboratories and businesses, who areconstantly interacting with whole groups of people in other fields. So it’s not like I’m entirely in his head all the time, although it’s an interesting place to be.”

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archives of Thomas Edison,” says Michelle Ortwein, thesupervisory museum curator at the Edison NationalHistorical Park in West Orange, New Jersey. “There’s a lot weknow, but there’s a lot we don’t know. There are always hid-den treasures in there.”An example is Edison’s prophecy, in October 1888, about

an as-yet-undiscovered technology: “I am,” hewrote, “experimenting upon an instrument whichdoes for the eye what the phonograph does forthe ear—which is the recording and reproductionof things in motion.” The collection even includesa note to Edison from the secretary of the RutgersCollege trustees: “With great pleasure, I informyou that the honorary degree of doctor of philos-ophy was conferred on you by the Trustees of Rutgers Collegeat their meeting held June 17, 1879.”

homas Edison, born in Milan, Ohio, 14 yearsbefore the start of the Civil War, was largely home-schooled by his mother, whose greatest gift, he

would recall, was instilling in him a lifelong love of reading.As a teenager living in Port Huron, Michigan, and working asa newsboy on the railroad that ran to Detroit, Edison visitedlocal libraries across the state, devouring the available litera-ture on electricity, magnetism, chemistry, and telegraphy. By16, he was working as a telegrapher. By all accounts, Edison was tireless, with a stubborn per-

sistence to the task at hand that saw him through countlesslaboratory failures. He was unafraid of a hard day’s labor.“Genius is all bosh,” he told the New York Sun in 1878.“Clean hard work is what does the business.”If Edison revolutionized the American approach to inno-

vation, the secret to his success may well have been hisemphasis on the practical. Not satisfied with groundbreakingdiscoveries in the lab, Edison wanted to make sure his researchcould be profitably marketed. “I am not a scientific man. I aman inventor,” Edison told the Brooklyn Citizen in 1888. “Assoon as I find that something I am investigating does not lead to practical results, I do not pursue it as a theory.”Fresh from a trip to England in 1873, where he marveled

at the latest technology in telegraphy, Edison set out to equipa modern research lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The big breakthrough came with the lightbulb. “The electric light,” Israel says, “is what transforms Menlo Parkfrom a research laboratory into a research-and-developmentlaboratory.”

Edison took all that he learned in Menlo Park aboutinvention, research, and development, and transferred it in1886 to a much larger operation in West Orange, New Jersey(he and Mina, his new bride, had built a house, Glenmont,in nearby Llewellyn Park). The main building of Edison’snew complex had both a large machine shop and a precision

machine shop, and separate laboratories were built to studyelectricity, chemistry, and metallurgy. The new site even had arecording studio and, perhaps most importantly, plenty ofspace for manufacturing.“Manufacturing was the way in which Edison thought

about invention,” Israel says, “because to be successful, youhad to have these things work in the real world. This is oneof the things that makes Edison such a successful innovator.He doesn’t just think about developing technology to thepoint where he can bring it to market, but actually brings itto market and thinks about how to improve it so that it’s suc-cessful in the marketplace. That’s really important.”As a scholar, Israel has specialized in the study of innova-

tion, so he’s taken a particular interest in Edison’s workhabits. He has come to understand, for example, the impor-tance of Edison’s early research in telegraphy, his pivotal tripto England in 1873, and his practice of conducting basicresearch to lay the groundwork for some future discovery. “That’s certainly something that comes out of his experi-

ence in Britain, where he encounters underground lines andcable telegraphs that create problems that he’s not familiarwith in telegraphy,” Israel says. “This begins his effort tounderstand more what’s going on in the transmission of elec-trical signals, and, in the process, leads to improvements incertain kinds of telegraph technology.”Scrutinizing the countless notebooks that Edison and his

assistants left behind, Israel discerned how Edison used thesame approach to unlock the mystery of the electric light.“Edison, like everybody, begins with the idea that he’s goingto focus on the lamp,” Israel says. “But he quickly realizesthat if you’re going to do an incandescent lamp, you alsoneed to think about the design of the generator, because the

“Genius is all bosh,” Edison told theNew York Sun in 1878. “Clean hardwork is what does the business.”

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generators that existed at that time weren’t really optimal forincandescent lighting systems. And this is one of Edison’s keyinsights. He devises an entire system, not just the lamp. Infact, he has a generator design before he has a successfullamp design.”Poring through the Edison record for three decades also

yielded clues about Edison’s relationships with his wives,each making clear her frustration over being neglected at theexpense of her husband’s lab. “There are these interestingaspects to Edison’s relationships to women in his life thatcome through in the notebooks as well as in correspondenceand elsewhere,” Israel says. “Both wives had the experienceof having this very famous husband who spent as much timeas he could in the laboratory.”In a notebook entry written shortly after they were married, Edison revealed his apparent

frustration with Mary, who had worked in the lab: “My wife, dearly beloved,” he surmised,“cannot invent worth a damn.”“The problem,” Israel says, “was that she just wasn’t showing enough interest in what he

was doing.” In the 1890s, when Edison was trying to extract low-grade ore from a mine innorthern New Jersey, he and Mina exchanged a series of testy notes stemming from his worka-holic habits. “She’d clearly been complaining to him that he’s not home,” Israel says. “And hewrites back to her that, ‘You and the children and the laboratory are the most importantthings in my life.’ Trying to reassure her that she was as important as the laboratory. I thinkultimately the laboratory might have been more important.”

o date, the Edison project’s collections are in assorted stages of completion: the five-part microfilm edition contains 281,000 document images on 288 film reels (asixth part is planned); six books, with drawings, transcriptions, and assiduous

annotations, have been published by Johns Hopkins University Press (the seventh of 15scheduled volumes is due in July); and the website contains 188,000 document images, mosttaken from the first three parts of the microfilm edition. This year’s budget for the EdisonPapers is about $700,000, with Rutgers providing the single largest chunk, about $230,000.Other key benefactors include the National Historical Publications and Records Commission($134,000), the New Jersey Historical Commission ($105,000), the National Endowment forthe Humanities ($102,000), and the National Park Service ($82,000). “It was a lot of detective work putting the archival material together in a way that made it

easy for people to use,” Israel says. “A lot of the material had never been gone through. Therewere related notebook pages in separate folders. It was a massive undertaking just to figureout where everything was and what was related to what.”There is, of course, still much work to be done. At the current rate of funding and staffing,

Israel says, the Edison Papers project could take another 25 years to complete. But in docu-menting the Edisonian record and making public an already colossal compilation, Israel andhis team have already illuminated decades of technological advances that changed the world,helping to bring the rest of us out of the dark. •

To learn more, visit edison.rutgers.edu.

Top, an advertisement for an Edison inven-tion, the vitascope, which was an early formof the film projector. Middle, a self-windingstock ticker, designed by Edison, circa 1870,used for receiving stock and commodity quotations. Bottom, a family portrait of the inventor with his son, daughter, and wife, Mina.