This is the story of the -other- Thomas Edison--not the heroic lone inventor, but Edison the businessman, industrialist, and successful manager of one of the world's largest industrial research laboratories. Tracing his career from his boyhood to his death in 1931, Edison and the Business of Innovation reveals Edison to be an entrepreneur of extraordinary vision. From extensive research in the Edison archives at West Orange, New Jersey, Andre Millard presents new information about Edison the businessman and provides new interpretations of old issues.

Taking a wide-ranging look at factual (and fictional) technology, Millard views the James Bond universe as evidence for popular perceptions of technological development as both inevitably progressive and apocalyptically threatening.