Morris’s book is not built as a revisionist biography—more on its strange architecture in a moment—but it usefully demolishes several myths that have accreted around Edison’s legacy in recent years. First, like various other men who share the “genius” epithet—see: Einstein, Picasso, Jobs—Edison is sometimes portrayed as a beautiful mind that emerged from the chrysalis of childhood awkwardness. He did bounce in and out of various schools in Ohio and Michigan, frustrating teachers in his early years. But under his mother’s tutelage, he read steadily and voraciously. By the age of 13, Edison had built a one-boy business selling fruits, groceries, and newspapers that netted $50 a week—the equivalent of an $80,000 annual salary today. Nearly all of this haul went to buying equipment for electric and chemical experiments. Barely pubescent, Edison was already combining the twin skills that would make him world-famous: a natural talent for earning money and an innate compulsion to invent.

A second myth that Morris swats away is the notion that Edison was a mere popularizer of other people’s work—a businessman who didn’t really invent anything. Most inventions adapt previous breakthroughs: From the steam engine to the iPhone, crucial advances have resulted from a tweak of a tweak of a tweak. To create something entirely new is practically impossible. And yet Edison seems to have done just that.

Early one morning in 1877, in his newly established lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, he was playing with a diaphragm—a cup-shaped device with a thin metal bottom, which vibrated as Edison shouted into it. Edison thought if he attached a needle to that metal bottom, he could record his words’ vibrations on a soft surface. An assistant built a small cylindrical device to spin a scroll of wax paper beneath the tip of the needle. Edison bellowed “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into the mouthpiece, and the needle etched his utterances into the wax paper, creating a retraceable record of the poem. “On pulling the paper through the second time,” his assistant Charles Batchelor wrote, the vibrations passed back through the needle and out through the mouthpiece, and “we both of us recognized we had recorded the speech.”

As far as we know, this was the first time in history that a human being listened to a recorded sound. Morris describes the moment in Homeric tones:

Since the dawn of humanity, religions had asserted without proof that the human soul would live on after the body rotted away. The human voice was a thing almost as insubstantial as the soul, but it was a product of the body and therefore must die too—in fact, did die, evaporating like breath the moment each word, each phoneme was sounded. For that matter, even the notes of inanimate things—the tree falling in the wood, thunder rumbling, ice cracking—sounded once only, except if they were duplicated in echoes that themselves rapidly faded. But here now were echoes made hard.

The year after inventing the phonograph, Edison built a telephone that surpassed the devices made by its inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, in an official contest of call clarity. The year after that, he achieved semidivine status with his incandescent light bulb. He did all this by the time he was 33, despite almost no prior experience in acoustics, telephony, or illumination technology. Such a feat is all but imponderable, like an athlete winning MVP awards in basketball, football, and baseball in consecutive years, having received barely any formal training in ball sports.