Contents

a. Folk Hero

b. An Obsession to Create

c. Crucibles of Creativity: The Labs

1. Edison's Top Assistants
2. The Search For The Right Filament
3. After The Lamp, He Created A Whole Electric System
4. They Worked For Edison At West Orange
5. From The Man Who Brought You The Movies
6. The Phonograph Became An Industry

d. He Made Science Serve

e. Postscript: The Edison Sites

f. Further Readings

For additional information, visit the Web site for
Edison National Historic Site

Passages in the book from Francis Jehl's Menlo Park Reminiscences are used with the permission of the Edison Institute. The passage from Francis T. Miller's Thomas A. Edison: An Inspiring Story for Boys, is used with the permission of Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc.

Nearly all the photographs in this book are from the collection at Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, N.J. A grant from the Eastern National Park and Monument Association helped cover the cost of making prints from negatives in the park's files. The photographs of the stock ticker and the vote recorder on page 8 and the filaments on pages 18 and 21 come from the collections of Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. The photographs of Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel F. B. Morse on page 10 are from the Library of Congress.