Ill the passage, the fatheT ielers to himself and Rakhi as: artists. stQTyLellers. tourist types. Passage11 55 science-illventions which had a future in the n]arket- place-at the expense of the theoretical. he separated his discoverics from those that shatteied popular values and beliefs. In fact, Edison deridcd scientists ,hO spent their lives "studying the fuzz on a bee" as morally sus- 60 pect and complained when one of his sons began to pursue theoretical physics. SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from In Search of America by Peter Jenningg and Todd Brewster (C12002 by The America Project, LLC). Deep inside a five-thousand-square-foot concrete vault, buried below the streets of West Orange, New Jersey, lie the artifacts of olle of history's greate&t inventors.. the notebooks, sketches, pateuts, contracts. 5 COeSpondenCe, invoices, prototypes. and blueprints of Thotnas Alva Edison and his legendary "invention fac- tory.. Bob Rosenberg, the director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project, says he knew relatively little about Edison when he agreed to come heie eighteen 10 years ago. He knows rnorc now. But both he and Paul Israel. his longtime colleague on this endeavor, say they have a long way to go to fully understand the Subject that bas beC0e theii life's work. By studying patents and drawings, ledger entries, and, especially, unbound scraps of paper uporA which Edison and kn's associates recorded ideas in the midst of 65 research, Rosenberg and Israel have exposed some of tbe innocent fictions that have developed around the Edison story and slowly given humatL foitll to a figure who had long been left to caricature. Yet. arnazingly, the man they have discovered is no less impressive arAd 70 perhaps even n]ore representative of the national ethos. While Europeans have always considered invention a rcfined occupation, in America it was a utilitarian activity, inspired by necessity and dedicated to results. The papers have revealed Edison to be perhaps the niost 75 representative figure of a technological style in the belief that if science is not serving humanity it is not worth pursuing. In Edison, the historians have chosen a subject 15 whose image has been well kneaded by legend and wor- ship. In the. late nineteenth century, as his reputation as an inventor of genius began to take flight, Tom Edisorl had been scen as something of a mystetious figuie, an alchemist scheming in a laboratory. But once the stream 20 of machines beoan to pour forth from his first major laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey (the phollO.Eyraph, . electric light, and an improved telephone were all invented thcre), peoplc discovered them to be the kinds of inventions that brougbt them excitlllg new 25 conveniences. By the 1970s, Edison's name had dropped down on the list of Amerlca's most admired. But, perhaps 80 because the waning days of the twentieth century and the first days of the twenty-first have defined a new "age of invention," one as dynamic and transforming &s the one that occurred over a hundred years ago, interest in Edison has recently skyrocketèd. Before Edison, the 85 image of the macbine was &s a behetnoth, enslavei of humans. with Edison, the machine becam¢ a slavG itself, to the human mirAd, an extension not OF the mus- cles, but of the brain, from which naturally followed every majoT technoLogical event, including the com- 90 puter. "Edison," says Rosellberg. 'was quite simply the best inventor who ever lived., Encouraged, in part, by Edison hitnself, who was a terrific seLf-prornoter, the public that had once shied from him grew to see Edison as an American hero. Par- ents exhorted their children to follow his CTedo of hard 30 woik. perseverance, and exploration. By the 1920s, Edison bad become all Atnerican senior statesman, the Midwestern country boy who, along with his friend Henry Ford, built the modern American city alld its vibrant, new, electric culture. Indeed, by the twenties, 35 Edison could witrAess the extraordinary impact of his labor: cities lit by his lighL the sounds of a booming tnusic industry created by his phonograph, a whole new form of popular culture-movies-established by his otion picture camera. Death did not diminigh his rep- 40 utation" it enhallced it. By the mid 1930s, polls ranked Edison's popularity near that of Lincoln and Washington.
