The Genius of Edison
CROSSED WIRES!
A Review of The Genius of Edison
by John Butterfield
Thomas Alva Edison famously called genius 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent persperation.
You’ll find much evidence of his genius on this CD-ROM — but you’ll work up a sweat trying to make sense of the man behind it.
The Genius of Edison suffers from a malady that came into existence with the invention of the CD-ROM. The disease is an evil twin to the chief virtue of CD-ROMs: interactivity.
In theory, interactivity allows the user to manipulate information on the disk to his or her own ends. Follow q link wherever it may lead. Wander from information on, say, a phonograph, to sound waves, to other inventions of the same time, to the telephone, to … ah, serendipity.
Which is fine if you’re exploring the course of human knowledge of the late 19th and early 20th Century.
But it’s not so fine if you’re trying to gain a picture of the inner workings of America’s foremost inventor. And that, presumably, is the path down which a CD-ROM titledThe Genius of Edison should take you.
But it’s a twisted road on this disk, prone to tangled branches, detours, and.ultimately, a dead end.
What’s missing? A sense of the man — who he was, and what made him strive so diligently, even ruthlessly, to surpass his competitors. Edison was the Bill Gates of his day, relentlessly combining griding labor (he also said, There is no substitute for hard work), moments of inspiration, and strong business sense to dominate and shape his era, and ours.
There’s a reason why biographers take years to produce a coherent, through-written work. The context and the summation are missing in The Genius of Edison. You’re left with the perspiration, but not the inspiration.
Take a look at the disk’s topic database, which lists all the subjects hotlinked from various articles on the disk. You’ll find several hundred listings: Bingo, Al Capone, Jay Gould, Mary Pickford, quantum theory, Sun Yat-Sen, Queen Victoria, waxed paper. Pretty good capsule summaries, too.
But what do they have to do with the genius of Thomas Edison, other than occupying roughly the same time (mid 19th-early 20th Century) and place (Planet Earth) as did he? They may flesh out his life and times, but they don’t hang together coherently. Neither does The Genius of Edison.What you will find here are in-depth looks at some of Edison’s foremost inventions — the products of Edison’s genius, not the man himself.
Starting with a screen depicting Edison’s Wheel of Wonders, a gear-studded viewing contraption like something out of a Jules Verne novel (he’s in the topic database too, by the way), the viewer can explore a variety of the inventions by which Edison changed the world. They range from the earthshaking (the light bulb, motion pictures) to the prosaic (a talking doll that was a dismal commercial failure).
Click on an invention and you’ll uncover computer-generated animation and period newsreels depicting the item, with narration by an actor portraying Edison. The tone is lighthearted — although forced at times — and the script makes an effort to accurately portray Edison as a man more concerned with commercial viability than with pure science.
From the computer-animated description of the invention, the viewer can jump to three sections: Tom’s Technology, an quick and lucid explanation of the science behind the object; Daily Edisonian, a made-up newspaper chronicling the invention and linking to events, personalities and popular culture of the time; and Time Marches On, a timeline putting the invention into historical context.
The disk offers decent quick access to various sections via Express — a popup screen accessible from every scene. Good thing, too; you’ll need it if you follow the links forward a step too far. It’s too easy to wander afield from the starting topic, and too hard to work back to where you began. You’ll find yourself resorting to this sort of advance to go option again and again to find your bearings — great in a Monopoly game, not so great for following a coherent narrative on a CD-ROM.
Make liberal use of the help option in the Express menu; it’ll provide quick access to major sections. The Tour option, however, is nothing more than a quick once-over — virtually useless except as a tease.
Technically, the disk is well polished, with much effort expended on crystal-clear sound, smooth, detailed animation, and well-integrated QuickTime video segments — including a number of Edison’s original Kinetoscopes, available when you choose that invention from the Wheel of Wonders, or the help option in the Express menu.
Too bad the same effort wasn’t put into making the man as lively as his inventions. While Tom Edison would have admired the technical wizardry behind The Genius of Edison, anyone who wants to get to know the Wizard of Menlo Park as a person had best look elsewhere for illumination.
Multimedia Cafe Scorecard
| Product: | The Genius of Edison |
| Company: | Compton’s NewMedia, Inc. |
| Cost: | $45.00 |
System Requirements:
WINDOWS: IBM-compatible multimedia computer
double-speed CD-ROM drive
486DX/33 MHz processor or better
8 MB RAM
Windows 95 or Windows 3.1
SVGA graphics card
Windows-compatible sound card.
MACINTOSH: 68040/25 MHz or better processor
8 MB RAM
System 7.1 or higher
QuickTime 2.1
Sound Manager 3.1.
Breakdown:
Entertainment Value 3
Educational Value 3
Concept 3
Depth 3
Interface 3
Overall Score:
(* 0 rating, 0 votes)
Loading ...
