Edison—Edmond Morris (Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2018, 800 pp.)

Edison, by author
Edmond Morris, is the latest of a number of biographies penned on inventor Thomas Alva Edison that date back to 1910, when Frank L. Dyer, Thomas C. Martin, and William Meadowcroft teamed up to write the first authorized biography of Edison,
Edison: His Life and Inventions,
with collaboration, approval, and some text written by Edison himself.1 Ever since that time, many biographies on Edison have been written—with no fewer than five serious biographies published since 1995. This recent publishing activity is quite an evidence of a strong and continuing interest in Edison and his inventions that resulted in 1,093 U.S. patents—not to mention the 500–600 patent applications that were either abandoned or unsuccessful. It also begs the question, “What is new in Morris’s book,
Edison
?”