The Seventh Volume of Thomas Edison's Papers The tantalizing thing about electricity, that fundamental force that lights our nights and floods our nanocircuits, is that no one has ever been able to say just what it is. Easy enough to see and feel what it does - even taste it, as schoolboys do when they grab each other's tongues and touch a battery. But when electricity isn't going someplace, it has no color, no character. Capable of experimenting for days at a stretch, neglecting food, sleep and family: Thomas Edison, circa 1884. Volume 7: Losses and Loyalties,April 1883-December 1884 Edited by Paul B. Israel, Louis Carlat, Theresa M. Collins and David Hochfelder The Johns Hopkins University Press. $95. Biographically speaking, the same might be said of Thomas Edison, the largely self-taught inventor who has done more to irradiate this planet than any other agent save the sun. Many books have been written about him, and a goodly portion of the five million pages of documents in his archive have been published in a series of wrist-cracking volumes. His big head and black brows and easy grin are as vivid in our historical mind's eye as the features of Abraham Lincoln. His surname attaches to countless schools and institutions, and enrages New Yorkers every time they open their monthly power bill. The incandescent lamp he perfected may soon spiral out of existence, yet cartoonists will continue to draw it when they wish to convey the ignition of an idea. Edison the man, however, remains elusive. He is legendary for what he did - among other things, patenting 1,093 inventions in such diverse disciplines as telegraphy, cinematography, sonics, metallurgy, chemistry and botany. What he was in person is harder, maybe impossible to say, because he put so much of himself into his work. There were times when his two wives and six children felt there was no self left over for them - loving though he could be on the occasional Sunday off. Even then, his jocular impenetrability precluded intimacy. The near-deafness that had shrouded him since puberty was a frustration for his friends, who got little out of shouting into his right ear. Edison quickened everything he touched, but could not be captured at source. The scheduled 15-volume series of "The Papers of Thomas A. Edison," now almost half complete, makes this elusiveness clear. This is not the fault of the team of editors, headed by Paul B. Israel, whose mission is to put much of Edison on paper and even more of his archive online. Their scholarship is admirable, right down to identifying which of the great man's scribbles are canceled, circled or "obscured overwritten." Even his changes of ink are noted. No complexity of electrical or chemical engineering goes unexplained, in language that honors Thomas Sprat's famous admonition to Royal Society scientists in 1684: "Reject all the Amplifications, Digressions and Swellings of Style; . . . return back to the primitive Purity and Shortness, when Men deliver'd so many Things, almost in an equal Number of Words." But the myriad technological and business records they have published so far, plus a small number of personal documents, do not coalesce, like the facets of a Chuck Close painting, into full-color portraiture. Volume 7, subtitled "Losses and Loyalties, April 1883-December 1884," is devoted to Edison's attempt to reinvent himself in his mid-30s as a businessman in New York. At 811 extra-large pages, it may not sell as well as the equally hefty first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography, which tore so many Christmas stockings in 2010. Nevertheless, as Close has remarked, even an agnosiac can get breadth of perception from the scrutiny of minutiae. In its superabundance of detail - steely facts and figures, great plates of text riveted with nouns and graffitied with cryptic drawings (Edison was an untrained but natural draftsman) - the book has the same kind of physical impact as that which stuns you when you enter his laboratory in West Orange, N.J. (The 21-acre complex is now Thomas Edison National Historical Park.) How, you ask yourself, can any one man have dreamed up and fabricated so many devices, from the first phonograph and first movie studio (rolling and rotatable on rails) to poured-cement houses, fuel cells and an execution harness for elephants? Room after room, floor after floor displays the hard evidence of Edison's genius. No exhibit is more eloquent than the "New Things" pigeonhole in his desk, still stuffed with ideas he meant to get around to when he had time. Edmund Morris, the author of biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Beethoven, is at work on a life of Thomas Edison. A collection of his writings, "This Living Hand and Other Essays," will be published this fall.