Edmund Morris writes about a man who was arguably the most famous in the world when he died in 1931, so revered for his perfection of the incandescent light bulb that President Hoover proposed darkening the entire United States for one minute on the night of his funeral. For the rest of the twentieth century, Edison's image, polished by his additional fame as the inventor of the phonograph, the Kinetoscope moving-picture camera, and the rechargeable alkaline battery, solidified into marble, cold to the touch and impossible to penetrate.