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The Age of Edison
- Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
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Publisher's summary
The late 19th century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but arguably the most important invention of all was Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb. Unveiled in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory in 1879, the light bulb overwhelmed the American public with the sense of the birth of a new age. More than any other invention, the electric light marked the arrival of modernity.
The light bulb became a catalyst for the nation’s transformation from a rural to an urban-dominated culture. City streetlights defined zones between rich and poor, and the electrical grid sharpened the line between town and country. "Bright lights" meant "big city". Like moths to a flame, millions of Americans migrated to urban centers in these decades, leaving behind the shadow of candle and kerosene lamp in favor of the exciting brilliance of the urban streetscape.
The Age of Edison places the story of Edison’s invention in the context of a technological revolution that transformed America and Europe in these decades. Edison and his fellow inventors emerged from a culture shaped by broad public education, a lively popular press that took an interest in science and technology, and an American patent system that encouraged innovation and democratized the benefits of invention. And in the end, as Freeberg shows, Edison's greatest invention was not any single technology, but rather his reinvention of the process itself. At Menlo Park he gathered the combination of capital, scientific training, and engineering skill that would evolve into the modern research and development laboratory. His revolutionary electrical grid not only broke the stronghold of gas companies, but also ushered in an era when strong, clear light could become accessible to everyone.
In The Age of Edison, Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility, in which the greater forces of progress and change are made visible by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.
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Very well written!
- By Amanda McCoy on 07-17-19
By: Mike Winchell
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Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy
- By: Tim Harford
- Narrated by: Roger Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy paints an epic picture of change in an intimate way by telling the stories of the tools, people, and ideas that had far-reaching consequences for all of us. From the plough to artificial intelligence, from Gillette's disposable razor to IKEA's Billy bookcase, best-selling author and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford recounts each invention's own curious, surprising, and memorable story.
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Thought provoking
- By Paul Norris on 09-10-17
By: Tim Harford
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Coal
- A Human History
- By: Barbara Freese
- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The fascinating, often surprising story of how a simple black rock altered the course of history. Yet the mundane mineral that built our global economy, and even today powers our electrical plants, has also caused death, disease, and environmental destruction. In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins three hundred million years ago and spans the globe.
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Uses Coal to push her Political Agenda
- By Kismet on 08-22-06
By: Barbara Freese
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The Alchemy of Air
- A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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At the dawn of the 20th century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the worlds scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives.
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Great Book Thoroughly Researched
- By Terry A. Gray on 10-21-11
By: Thomas Hager
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City
- A Guidebook for the Urban Age
- By: P. D. Smith
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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For the first time in the history of our planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - is now living in cities. City is the ultimate guidebook to our urban centers - the signature unit of human civilization. With erudite prose, this unique work of metatourism explores what cities are and how they work. It covers history, customs and language, districts, transport, money, work, shops and markets, and tourist sites, creating a fantastically detailed portrait of the city through history and into the future.
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Commuters companion
- By Anna on 05-19-13
By: P. D. Smith
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Wonderland
- How Play Made the Modern World
- By: Steven Johnson
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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From the New York Times best-selling author of How We Got to Now and Extra Life, a look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. This history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.
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It will delight you
- By T. Leach on 02-09-17
By: Steven Johnson
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Fordlandia
- The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
- By: Greg Grandin
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 15 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Fordlandia by National Book Award finalist Greg Grandin tells the enthralling tale of Henry Ford’s failed attempts to transform a Connecticut-sized chunk of Brazilian rainforest into a homespun slice of American utopia.
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An eye-opening account of an arrogant man's folly
- By Melissa on 09-17-13
By: Greg Grandin
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Chocolate Wars
- The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers
- By: Deborah Cadbury
- Narrated by: Deborah Cadbury
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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With a cast of characters that wouldnt be out of place in a Victorian novel, Chocolate Wars tells the story of the great chocolatier dynasties, through the prism of the Cadburys. Chocolate was consumed unrefined and unprocessed as a rather bitter, fatty drink for the wealthy elite until the late 19th century, when the Swiss discovered a way to blend it with milk and unleashed a product that would conquer every market in the world.
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The World of Chocolate
- By Jean on 11-05-14
By: Deborah Cadbury
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The Network
- The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age
- By: Scott Woolley
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the origin story of the airwaves - the foundational technology of the communications age - as told through the 40-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend, Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio.
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The Classic Struggle
- By Jean on 06-01-16
By: Scott Woolley
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Simply Electrifying
- The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk
- By: Craig R. Roach
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Simply Electrifying: The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often dangerous story of electricity's historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.
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decent, but ended up disappointing.
- By Alexander Douglass on 12-28-18
By: Craig R. Roach
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American Eclipse
- A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World
- By: David Baron
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In the scorching summer of 1878, with the Gilded Age in its infancy, three tenacious and brilliant scientists raced to Wyoming and Colorado to observe a rare total solar eclipse. One sought to discover a new planet. Another - an adventuresome female astronomer - fought to prove that science was not anathema to femininity. And a young megalomaniacal inventor, with the tabloid press fast on his heels, sought to test his scientific bona fides and light the world through his revelations.
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Just OK.
- By Melanie A Hwalek on 09-18-17
By: David Baron
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City of the Century
- The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America
- By: Donald L. Miller
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 24 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, witness Chicago's growth from a desolate fur-trading post in the 1830s to one of the world's most explosively alive cities by 1900. Donald Miller's powerful narrative embraces it all: Chicago's wild beginnings, its reckless growth, its natural calamities (especially the Great Fire of 1871), its raucous politics, its empire-building businessmen, its world-transforming architecture, its rich mix of cultures, its community of young writers and journalists, and its staggering engineering projects.
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A STORY THAT TRIES TOO HARD....AND FAILS
- By The Louligan on 02-01-15
By: Donald L. Miller
What listeners say about The Age of Edison
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- kyle
- 03-10-16
great book
love how this book shows how Edison did not invent the light bulb. this book goes in depth In the history of the electric grid and the modern light.
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- Julie Seavello
- 05-10-22
Not about Edison himself, but about the times
This book is not about Edison himself, but about the age he lived in. It was fascinating to learn about those times, and how different their world was from now, and to imagine how my great grandparents must have experienced the changes from candlelight to kerosene to gas to electric light. They were immigrant farmers, so they would have seen the lighting in the big cities that they traveled through, like New York. Must have been amazing to them.
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- Texastanya
- 01-30-15
Tough Read/Listen
What would have made The Age of Edison better?
This book needed to be edited/shortened considerably.
What could have been an interesting 2-3 hour read, was drug out for 10 hours.
Excruciating.
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- Ryan
- 12-01-13
Not about ingenuity
What would have made The Age of Edison better?
I read most of this book, and it was more of the business of competition, rather than the challenge of discovery. While I understand the need to establish why gas-lighting is bad, arc-lighting wasn't any good, the amount of time spent on both of those and the idea that it was simply free-trade financiers who got Edison to "win," is really not the real story I was looking for. I don't think I learned anything about Edison.
Would you ever listen to anything by Ernest Freeberg again?
don't know.
What about Sean Pratt’s performance did you like?
yes
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