Historical Society to host presentation on Edison

Sparta Historical Society welcomes Dr. Paul Israel, director and editor of the Edison Papers at Rutgers University on May 12 at Sparta Presbyterian Church, located at 32 Main St. from 7-8:30 p.m.

Following the presentation, refreshments will be served. Those attending will have a chance to ask questions about the topic or other issues relating to the history of Thomas Edison. Members are free, nonmembers $10, students with ID are free.

In this lecture, Dr. Paul Israel reexamines Edison’s work on electric lighting to examine how he succeeded by transforming invention into a larger process of innovation. While he will focus Edison’s work on electric lighting, Dr. Israel will discuss the changes in his approach to invention that Edison began to make as a telegraph inventor and then look at how he drew on the lessons he learned from his work on electric lighting to make innovations in other industries.

To date the Edison Papers project has produced nine volumes of The Papers of Thomas A. Edison as well as an online digital image edition with over 150,000 documents with plans to add additional documents. In 2005 the Society for the History of Technology awarded the Edison Papers a special, one-time retrospective award as a model reference work published since the founding of the Society 1958.