Word: edisonizing
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...Edison the Man (M. G. M.). Villiers de I'Isle-Adam, eccentric French nobleman, spent much of his life on Paris park benches, scribbling on scraps of paper which he filed in his tattered pockets. When one batch of scraps was collated, it turned out to be a fantasy about U. S. Inventor Thomas Alva Edison. In Adam's The Future Eve, "le wizard de Menlo Park" meditates and mourns that his phonograph was invented too late to record the really great sounds of human history -the blaring of the trumpets of Jericho, Memnon's sigh...
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's approach to the Edison legend is somewhat different. Installment No. 1, Young Tom Edison, showed its protagonist (Mickey Rooney) leading the life of an early Christian martyr in Port Huron, Mich. Sufficient time having elapsed since young Mickey Rooney steamed away to glory, leaving behind young Edison's harrowing boyhood, the public mind passes painlessly to Installment No. 2, solid, literal and prosaic, with big budget written over every sequence. It also has sterling, matter-of-fact Spencer Tracy making a brave, respectful effort at verisimilitude by looking a little wild at moments...
...Spencer Tracy, Edison beds down thriftily in the basement of a bank for which he soon contrives a stock ticker. He also has a decorous love affair with the future Mrs. Edison (Rita Johnson), invents the phonograph by left-handed chance, the electric light by hard work, battles heroically to secure the street-lighting franchise for Manhattan, signs off with honors...
...Congress, to the people. The drumfire from Europe reached crescendo. He left the White House for an evening afloat on the Potomac. He played with his stamps, "did some think ing." He called in the civilians and officers who assist him in running the Navy and Army: Secretaries Edison (due to go soon) and Woodring (long overdue to go); Assistant Secretary of War Johnson (whose brash, abrasive voice crying in the wilderness for men & arms last year was too loud for his own, the Army's and the country's comfort); Chief of Naval Operations Harold R. Stark...
...Washington last week, U. S. Navy Secretary Charles Edison clarified his views about the raging World War II controversy of battleship v. airplane (see p. 18). Said...