One of Stross's main tasks in The Wizard of Menlo Park is to penetrate this veneer and to distinguish between Edison the myth and Edison the man.
Overall, The Wizard of Menlo Park brings into sharp and dramatic focus the extent to which modern society and its patterns of mass leisure are indebted to the inventions of Thomas Alva Edison.
We also enjoyed a virtual tour of the reconstructed Menlo Park laboratory; in 1929 the "birthplace" of the phonograph and the incandescent lamp was moved from New Jersey to Greenfield Village, Michigan -- lock, stock, and barrel, mind you -- by Henry Ford, the Wizard of Menlo Park's pal and fellow magnate, to celebrate the light bulb's fiftieth anniversary.
He was a professorial, though untutored, scientist; he was an alchemist, an intimate of Mme Blavatsky, and a card-carrying Theosophist; he was a tinkerer, a Yankee mechanic, innocent of theoretical knowledge, like Alexander Graham Bell and Eli Whitney; he was the Wizard of Menlo Park, progressing beyond the normal human range; he was a Horatio Alger hero, a financial success; he was a financier, the cynically manipulative cohort of Jay Gould and J.P.