Edison

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), who introduced the light bulb and the phonograph to a startled world from his pastoral New Jersey retreat, strides across Baldwin's engrossing epic biography as a complex, contradictory figure. The hearing-impaired inventor was a visionary inclined ``to think globally long before achieving success locally,'' a cranky, authoritarian businessman, a daredevil entrepreneur pathologically addicted to work, a metaphysical thinker who practiced automatic writing and who, inspired by Madame Helena Blavatsky's theosophical/mysticism, postulated that intelligence pervades every atom of God's creation. To Baldwin (Man Ray: American Artist), the Ohio-born genius, who pioneered the microphone, the motion-picture camera and the world's first central electric-light power plant, embodied the American experiment in industrial civilization and the potential of technological change. By charting Edison's relations with venture capitalists, unsung collaborators and competitors, Baldwin spins an inspirational American saga of titanic determination and protean imagination. Edison's later projects-his decade-long, abortive iron-ore milling and smelting operation, and his return to the soil, at age 80, in search of a natural source for rubber in his own herbarium-take their rightful place in the story. We also meet the torn family man whose neglect of home and hearth contributed to the death at age 29 of his chronically ill, emotionally troubled first wife, Mary Stilwell. His second wife, heiress Mina Miller, by this account became his subservient helpmeet, while his domineering, impossible-to-please ways drove his six children into convoluted patterns of dependence and alienation. Photos. (Feb.)