February 2008
Intermediate to advanced
192 pages
4h 1m
English
Edison sketched entire inventions into his notebooks, but, often, he also filled notebook pages not with whole devices but with components that might be used in any number of devices. Early in his career, for example, when he was developing automatic telegraph transmitters, receivers, and recorders, he poured onto many pages all sorts of designs for a mechanical escapement, a component vital to synchronizing transmission, reception, and recording. The Edison scholar Paul Israel has called this remarkable compilation of designs—which included original designs as well as designs copied from various published sources—a "dictionary of escapements." Edison the innovator was always looking for ways to avoid the ...