Reviews for Illuminated Progress: The Story of Thomas Edison

The average rating for Illuminated Progress: The Story of Thomas Edison based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-04-22 00:00:00 Robert Obrien I highly recommend this slim and engaging book. Seth Shulman is a science journalist who was given a chance to spend a year in residence at MIT's Dibner Institute on the history of science. He went there intending to do a comparison of the lives and work of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. But that was before he stumbled across a page from Bell's research notebook that got him wondering how the emigre Scotsman had suddenly achieved a key breakthrough that allowed him to be heard by his assistant Watson in their famous 1876 experiment. More specifically, he found that the drawing Bell put in the notebook of a cartoonish head listening by the telephone receiver was an almost exact duplicate of one in a patent application filed by a more experienced inventor, Elisha Gray, who was already famous for his many telegraph inventions. But it gets better, and by the time he is finished, Shulman has found strong circumstantial evidence that Bell may have stolen Gray's key idea to win his patent, and moreover, that he may have committed this uncharacteristic sin to earn enough money to marry the love of his life, Mabel Hubbard, the privileged daughter of his wealthy benefactor. Shulman has expanded this into a book by not only laying out his evidence, but by letting the reader join him on his chronological quest for information. This "you are there" approach slows the book down in a couple places, but otherwise is an effective means of involving the reader in his sleuthing. There is even some evidence that Bell felt terribly guilty about the way he acquired his extroardinarily lucrative patent (it led eventually to the creation of AT&T). After winning one of the most famous patents in history, Bell did almost no further work on the telephone.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-23 00:00:00 Paul Goldstein What if one of the best known inventors stole his idea from someone else? What if it was only uncovered 100 years later by accident? This true story of the discovery of the intrigues behind the invention of the telephone will blow apart the story you've taken for granted since it was first told to you way back when. An amazing tale of historical research that reads like a detective novel. Highly recommended.