Book Blurbs

Edison “brought out a pear-shaped glass bulb intended for lamp experiment…and gave it to Upton [a highly trained mathematician], asking him to calculate its cubic contents in centimeters. Upton drew the shape of the bulb exactly on paper, and got the equation of its lines, with which he was going to calculate its contents, when [...]

“The traditional view of invention assumed that it was something like an act of God, a ‘divine accident’; like ‘the poet in a fine frenzy rolling,’ the inventor and the scientist were supposed to discover things by a stroke of genius…Edison was a genius who held that there was no such thing as genius. With [...]