The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but more than any other invention, Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb marked the arrival of modernity, transforming its inventor into a mythic figure and avatar of an era. In The Age of Edison, award-winning author and historian Ernest 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 and capturing the wonder Edison’s invention inspired. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility in which the greater forces of progress and change are made by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects.
Author Introduction
Ernest Freeberg grew up in New England, attended Middlebury College, and worked as a reporter for Maine Public Radio. Now a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee, he has published two award-winning books. The Education of Laura Bridgman won the Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association, a biennial prize for the best first book in any field of American history. His more recent Democracy's Prisoner was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in biography, and won both the David Langum Award for Legal History and the Eli Oboler Award from the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Roundtable. His 2013 book, Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, examines the social and cultural impact of electric light on American society in that invention's early decades.
