Edmund Morris.
EDMUND MORRIS: THOMAS EDISON BIOGRAPHY
EDISON (2020)
A Time magazine best book of the year.
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Thomas Edison (born 1847) was an extraordinaly prolific inventor, his most famous invention being the electric light bulb. Beyond that he developed numerous electro=mechanical devices including the gramohphone, and the motion picture camera. In all he took out over 1,000 patents. Alongside these individual inventions, Edison pioneered the concept of the industrial research laboratory -something previously unknown, but which is now a critical part of every technology company. Edison’s mother, a school teacher, taught the young Edison arithmetic, reading and writing. He attended school for only a fw months, but he was a very curious child who learned much by reading on his own. By the time he was thirteen he was earning $50 a week selling newspapers and candy on long distance trains. At 15 he saved a three year old from being hit by a runaway train; the child’s father, a station agent, was so grateful to Edison that he trained him as a telegraph operator - something that reinforced Edison’s interest in things electro-mechanical. He went on to work for Western Union and the Associated Press, alongside his personal inventing activities. At the age of 29 he set up a commercial research company with his fellow telegrapher and inventor Franklin Pope. He ended up founding fourteen companies including General Electric, which later became of the largest companies in the USA.
Edmund Morris’ biography of Edison was the result of seven years of work, much of it within Edison;s extensive archives. Sadly, Morris died of a stroke in 2019 - after he had completed the book, but before it was published. The Guardian desribed the book as ‘Meticulously researched, with an attention to detail of which Edison would doubtless have approved’. The Wall Street Journal wrote: ‘The writer who gave us a masterly biography of Theodore Roosevelt found, for his final work, an equally compelling subject in the oddball genius whose discoveries continue to light our world.’
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Edmund Morris (born 1940) was an American author, born in South Africa. He dropped out of college and started working as an advertising copywriter, first in Durban then in London. He moved to the USA and wrote his first book on the rise of American president Theodore Roosevelt. This was very well received, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biorgraphy or Autobirography. It became the first volume of a trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt. Morris subsequently wrote a biography of Beethoven, and a controversial biography of Ronald Reagan, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography.
