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<title>Volume 2: From Workshop to Laboratory </title>
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<h1 style="font-family:arial;">Volume 2:From Workshop to Laboratory (June 1873-March 1876)</h1><br><h2 style="margin-left:20%">Introduction to Volume 2</h2>
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<p>The mid-187os were heady years for Thomas Alva Edison. He commanded the respect of the telegraph industry's cor porate leaders; watched his own financial fortunes rise, sink, and rise again; fathered Thomas, Jr., his second child; and moved increasingly into the public eye-reviled as a perfidi ous mountebank, praised as an inventive genius, and dis missed as an incompetent scientific investigator. He left the running of his manufacturing shop largely to his partner Joseph Murray and broadened his own horizons in several directions, assuming at various times the roles of student, author, and designer/manufacturer of consumer goods.</p>
<p>By 1875 he felt financially sophisticated enough to offer marketing ad vice to the notorious financier Jay Gould. As the nation wrestled with a prolonged economic depression, Edison took a bold initiative. Determined to live primarily by his wits, he left his shop-floor, experimental workshop to start an inde pendent laboratory devoted to invention. One year later he moved the laboratory, its staff, and his family out of Newark.</p>
<p>The three years documented in this volume were important ones in Edison's development. During these years he was in creasingly following his own lines of research. Moreover, with several years of intensive experimentation behind him, he drew on his previous work for ideas and solutions with grow ing frequency. By 1876 Edison was widely recognized as a leading electrical inventor. His principal assistant, Charles Batchelor, called him America's "foremost inventor and electrician . . . by far," and a credit report acknowledged him to be "a genius."Just back from England in 1873, he was a prom ising young man with more backers than notable inventive accomplishments; three years later, he moved to Menlo Park a seasoned, successful inventor.</p>
<p>Because of the wide range of documentary evidence avail able, the years covered by Volume Two of the Edison Papers have been almost as interesting and diverse for the volume editors to study as they were for Edison to live through. Edi son tried several methods of recording laboratory notes, one being his "Experimental Researches,'' a book of entries self consciously patterned on that of Michael Faraday. As Edison assembled an experimental team, beginning with Charles Batchelor and James Adams, laboratory notebook entries be came collective documents, unassignable to a single author. Patent-related materials for this period include thirty-two successful applications, thirty-six caveats, and all the asso ciated correspondence and legal documents. Edison provided public accounts of his work in interviews with newspaper re porters ·and in articles he wrote for the technical press. He started a book manuscript that was as much a description of his own explorations as a discussion of telegraph technology, and he published articles as science editor of the Operator. Edison's often-complex business arrangements generated a variety of agreements and correspondence. The technical success of his quadruplex telegraph, combined with his 1874 financial straits, led to public acclaim.and abuse, labyrinthine intrigues in the U.S. Patent Office, and proceedings in several courts, each with its own documentary legacy.</p>
<p>Quantity is no measure of historical significance. Edison's accomplishments, not the simple vasmess of the Edison ar chive, are the motivation for this edition. But quantity may be the most editorially challenging aspect of the documents available for Volume Two and the volumes to come. In assembling Volume One the editors selected roughly ninety percent of the relevant material in the archive at the Edison National Historic Site; for Volume Two the selection approximates only fifteen percent. Partly as a result of this change-and partly as a reflection of Edison's growing intellectual indepen dence-the editors' task in annotating documents has be come one of alerting the reader to relevant unselected archival material as much as referring to developments outside Edison's ambition. Almost all of the unselected documents cited are in the microfilm edition of Edison's papers. The film and its accompanying guides not only serve general researchers but are also fundamental research tools of the book edition's editorial staff.</p>
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