Documenting genius one page at a time
Archived article from Oct 22, 1999
By Douglas Frank
Reese Jenkins became the first director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers in 1978 and once joked to an interviewer that the project would probably outlast him.
Jenkins stepped down in 1995, after 17 years, relinquishing the reins to his managing editor, Bob Rosenberg, who now says without a smile that "it might well outlast me." He suggests that the editorial project could continue well into the second decade of the next century.
"It was scheduled to be a 20-year project," says Rosenberg. "We originally thought that there were one and a half million pages in the archives, but now we estimate that there are at least five million."
A thorough inventory of the archives was taken over the first five years, "and we just kept finding a box here, crates there, some under the cabinet. We had to shoot several people who kept finding new documents," he says with half a smile.
The work of the Edison Papers project is essentially to produce annotated compilations of the papers of the American genius. Most of Edison's documents are housed at the inventor's West Orange, N.J., laboratory, which became a National Historic Site in 1962. There are documents elsewhere, but at the most 250,000 pages, estimates Rosenberg.
Edison's archives contain not only documents relating to his 1,093 patents, but also his notebooks, correspondence, legal papers and company records. Edison founded many companies over the years -- all different kinds of enterprises from iron ore and cement to motion pictures and the phonograph. In this century, he was head of Thomas A. Edison Inc., an umbrella organization for his many activities, and much of the five million pages is 20th-century business records, says Rosenberg.
"It's fair to say we're going to publish about 10 percent of the total, a great deal from the beginning of the Edison era and then less as time goes on and everything expands. There are at least two million pages that we have to consider, and then we're going to publish about 500,000 pages in microfilm and a digital edition on the Internet. That's a lot of material."
Now in its third decade, the Edison Papers project has already published four of a proposed six parts of the microfilm edition and four of an estimated 15 book volumes. The published microfilm covers 1847 up to 1910; the next part will be 1911 to 1920, and the last 1921 to 1931.
The books go through 1878 with the fourth book, a 919-page tome published last year and titled "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (Johns Hopkins University Press), focusing solely on 1878, when Edison developed the phonograph, made a breakthrough in the development of telephone transmitters and announced the advent of domestic electric lighting. The phonograph made him one of the most famous people in the world, and his installation at Menlo Park, N.J., became the world's first great research laboratory, drawing scientists from all over the globe.
"In 1877 he invented the phonograph, but only made it public in December 1877. In early 1878, boom! Edison became the inventor of the age," remarks Rosenberg.
"After and during the phonograph work, he was perfecting his telephone transmitter and got that nailed down in March of 1878. Completely burned out, he took a vacation that summer, came back and started to work on the light. It was a hell of a year," says Rosenberg.
Volume Five, now under way, will cover January 1879 to March 1881, when Edison moves from Menlo Park to New York. It will essentially cover the electric light, including the development of the system's components and the very first small installations of electricity.
People often ask Rosenberg what Edison was like. The papers, he says, paint a picture of an industrious, hardworking, almost workaholic genius, who often slept in his office and was sometimes racked with guilt about not spending more time with his family.
And what about his personal life? "Well, his work was his personal life. When he wasn't at home with his family, he was in the laboratory. Edison writes to his second wife, saying, 'You, the children and the laboratory are everything to me,'" although, Rosenberg notes, "not necessarily in that order."
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