Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor's Life

Abstract

“IT is estimated,” so Mr. Francis Arthur Jones tells us, “that if everything that has ever been written and published about Edison were collected and re-published in book form, it would make a library of a thousand volumes—each volume containing an average of a hundred thousand words.” The present biography is a most readable and interesting book, which gives a very good insight into Edison's life in the space of 375 pages. It is written for the general rather than the scientific reader. It would be a capital book to place in the hands of schoolboys, and if juvenile readers were to play at setting up makebelieve printing presses in railway trains in emulation of Edison's first attempts at educating himself the amusement would be a harmless and instructive one, if they did not reproduce the fiasco which first put the youthful inventor “down on his luck.”

Thomas Alva Edison: Sixty Years of an Inventor's Life.

By Francis Arthur Jones. Pp. xvi + 375; with 22 illustrations. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907.) Price 6s. net.