Edison, His Life and Inventions by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

The feed is a LibriVox audiobook of Edison, His Life and Inventions, Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin's biography of Thomas Alva Edison, with one chapter in each episode. It is the book itself, read aloud, not a modern retelling. The book was written while Edison was alive, and it shows: he is quoted at length, and by his own account a few strips of salvaged platinum were still in use in his laboratory more than forty years later. The authors also give plenty of background. The chapter called 'The Age of Electricity' spends its time on the United States in 1847, a country taking in the Oregon region and the lands won in the Mexican War. It lists what invention had already produced: vulcanized rubber, galvanized iron, the early reaper, the sewing machine, the friction match. Next to all that, electricity is described as a vast field no one had yet worked, and the telegraph as the first industry to make fortunes from it. The chapter even mentions that the founder of Cornell University was once glad to buy breakfast in New York with a quarter he found on Broadway. 'Edison’s Pedigree' goes further back, to Dutch ancestors who were millers on the Zuiderzee and an ancestor who fought in the War of Independence and lived past one hundred. It also names the ship-owning family friend, Captain Alva Bradley, after whom Edison was named. Telegraphy runs through the chapters on his youth. He visits telegraph offices as a railroad newsboy, works nights at Stratford, where the book says his inventiveness first showed, and moves from job to job across the Central West. In one of his own stories, Louisville will not answer while a War Department cipher for General Thomas at Nashville comes in on the wire. In Boston, a friend, Milton Adams, presses a Western Union manager to hire him, and chemistry experiments that the book sees as groundwork for his later work on the incandescent lamp and the storage battery end with acid running down his back. 'The Stock Ticker' quotes a Boston speculator who said the tape's few letters 'spell ruin in 99 million ways', then turns to Edison's sudden rise to $300 a month and twenty-hour days. Footnotes are read aloud where they fall in the text. The narration is formal and admiring, and Edison's quoted stories are plainer. Jude Cater reads 'The Young Telegraph Operator', and Ray Christensen reads 'The Stock Ticker'. For the telegraph years, 'The Young Telegraph Operator' and 'Arduous Years In The Central West' are the obvious chapters to pick.