Nikola Tesla didn’t stay for long, and he wasn’t alone. Edison could be trying. He barely ate or slept. A man should leave the table hungry, he believed, which in his case meant six ounces or less of food per day, washed down by milk. He bathed and shaved irregularly; his suits, stained with chemicals, were clownishly baggy because he feared that tight clothing caused internal bleeding. Time meant nothing to him. He worked till he dropped from exhaustion, often sleeping on a workbench in his lab. Almost completely deaf for most of his life (“I haven’t heard a bird sing since I was 12”), he considered his disability an advantage because “it has preserved me from the distractions of a noisy world.” But even deafness couldn’t keep him from rendering harsh judgments about sounds he could barely hear. When Sergei Rachmaninoff, considered the world’s leading pianist, auditioned for a contract with Edison’s record company, Edison cut him off after three notes. “Who told you you were a piano player?” he sneered. “You’re a pounder.”

Entirely self-made, Edison disdained those who fell on hard times. And the threat of a labor strike brought out the worst in him, which usually meant mass layoffs. Employees “were constantly on the lookout for jobs that paid better and abused them less,” Morris writes of the demoralized work force. Edison’s least favorite people were union leaders and pompous academics — the sort who’d never solved a technical problem or built anything of value with their hands. Among his few friends was Henry Ford, a farmboy mechanic like himself. The two saw eye to eye on many things, though Edison dismissed Ford’s all-consuming anti-Semitism as a waste of precious energy. “I do not want to get into any controversy about the English, Irish, Germans or Jews,” he said, “or even Yankees.”

For all his quirks, Morris reminds us, Edison never lost sight of the future. And that, perhaps, is the key takeaway from this elegant, loosely crafted, idiosyncratic book. No inventor did more to nudge the world toward modernity, and few had a better feel for what the next generation of inventors might pursue. Topping that list was a plea for a greener country — not because Edison was an environmentalist, but because he despised the excess and inefficiency that had come to define American industry and leisure, thanks in no small part to his close chum, Henry Ford. “This scheme of combustion in order to get power makes me sick to think of — it is so wasteful,” he grumbled. “Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides. … There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces.” He added, in true Edison fashion: “I’ll do the trick myself if someone doesn’t get at it.”