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The Landmark series for children, both American and World, is a wonderful, with few exceptions, collection of books written in the 1950s and 1960s and published by Random House. The publisher chose well-known authors, some of whom were novelists and some of whom had not written for children before, and had a historical consultant for each title to make sure that the writing was accurate. There are 122 American Landmark books and 63 World Landmark books. The reading level is fairly broad, intended for upper elementary to early high school levels. The books were intended to convey sound history or biography but in such a manner as to not detract from the intrinsic interest of the story, as history textbooks often do, but to bring out the fascination and drama of the history or historical character being discussed. History is at heart a series of stories, especially at this level, and should be told as such. For the overwhelming majority of the 185 titles, this effort was successful.
Margaret Cousins was a Texas-born writer who worked extensively in New York City before retiring back to her home state in her later years. She wrote the Landmark Book Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia in 1952, and We Were There at the Battle of the Alamo, one of my favorites of the We Were There series (see my book review), in 1958. This review concerns itself with the other Landmark Book that she wrote, about the great inventor, Thomas Edison, entitled The Story of Thomas Alva Edison.
Edison was an interesting person. Blessed with a boundless store of physical and mental energy, he pursued being a successful inventor with all that he had. He started out with telegraphy, since he worked with the railroads and was a telegraph operator, and this method of communication was all-important at that time – he was born in 1847 and began inventing in the early 1860s. He was mainly self-taught in technical areas, with a huge library full of scientific books from a wide variety of fields but mainly focused on chemistry, physics, and electrical engineering. When he identified a good area for new inventions, he would read extensively in the technical literature before he went into the laboratory. If someone is asked what did Edison do, they might remember “the light bulb!” But he invented so much more than that, including the phonograph, the movie camera, the electric power grid, cement production, concrete houses, and batteries. By the time he died in 1931, he held slightly more than 1000 US patents and more than 2000 foreign patents! He was not a scientist or really even an engineer but was a pure inventor, putting technical knowledge to use for mankind and for him to make a living.
But Edison was not just a lone inventor – don’t picture him stuck in his little laboratory over his garage, working long hours by candlelight. Among his other inventions, he developed the large-scale industrial laboratory, devoted to the research and development of new products that would be successful in the market place. His laboratory at one point employed hundreds of technical assistants. That is the model still used by successful companies today. I have read a 900-page biography of Edison that one can say barely scratches the surface of his life and technical accomplishments. Margaret Cousins in her Landmark Book, The Story of Thomas Alva Edison, condenses Edison’s life into a manageable, well-written book that covers the highlights of his character and accomplishments. It is worth getting to know this incredible man, who has played such a large role in industrial and technical development in this country and around the world.