Some biographers start with death – in medio mors, perhaps, rather than the classical in medias res. Benjamin Button-like, Edmund Morris works backwards through Thomas Edison’s life, from developing rubber with American plants through defence work in the first world war, hundreds of refinements to the phonograph, batteries, electric light in the incandescent light bulb, all the way to a boy in Marion, Ohio, and Port Huron, Michigan, selling newspapers on a train.

“Half deaf in one ear and wholly in the other”, Edison was famed for his odd and intense work habits, for long nights in the laboratory and fanatical devotion to experimentation until his mind was satisfied. This quest for perfection hampered him in the fullest commercial exploitation of his patents.

Something was different about Menlo Park, New Jersey, and the later laboratory in nearby West Orange. At the centre of it all sat Edison, hunched over a workbench, experimenting himself while supervising others frequently working as the “Insomnia Squad” on projects of particular intensity. “More than 10,000 experiments on his car battery”, for instance.

The inventions kept coming: Edison was awarded 1,093 patents in the US alone. The miner’s safety lamp, the stock ticker, the first true motion pictures with sound, the carbon transmitter for the telephone, the X-ray fluoroscope distributed to doctors without a license fee. Morris, who died in May, was fascinated by Edison’s many inventions related to sound and the inherent difficulty of inventing them, given his severe hearing loss.

As with all Morris’s work, including his Pulitzer prize winner on Theodore Roosevelt, the book is meticulously researched, with an attention to detail of which Edison would doubtless have approved, if with a sometimes soporific density, of which Edison would probably not have approved.

Real science is inevitable and necessary but the book presumes familiarity with scientific terminology. By page four, there is a reference to “thermionic emission of carbon electrons” with no additional help for readers who might have done poorly in school physics. Some may close the book at this point; others might wait for the numbing details of battery development, presumably chiefly of interest to patent lawyers, which rather obscure Edison’s real advances in electrochemistry. Too bad, as the story of electric light is probably the book’s, well, highlight.

If it is not merely to be hagiography, or in Edison’s case, a history of technology, a biography of such an extraordinary person must inquire into the subject’s psychology and the life behind the exterior. Recounting the ups and downs of Edison’s businesses (and his quirks, such as an occasional difficulty with arithmetic) serves as a counterpoint to the successes arising from his inventive mind. But here numerous pages on a challenging family life seem excessive and Edison’s own frankness, not least with the press, is a fine example of what a later, technically minded generation would call WYSIWYG.

Of Edison’s sheer genius there is no doubt. His achievements are unparalleled. Yet when they are presented as Morris does they become garbled, businesses foundering before they are formed or children graduating before we learn of their birth. Put bluntly (as Edison undoubtedly would have), the book’s structure doesn’t work. Edison, of all people, would surely have scoffed that science and technology progress. Just as he continued to refine his most cherished inventions for years after the original patents, he would have found it odd that anyone would read backwards.

So why this organization, causing confusion at the beginning and later interventions to preserve or rebalance the narrative? Is Morris implying that the spark of genius and the impulsive need to work and invent all emerged, Rosebud-like, from Edison’s childhood deafness? Almost the last paragraph in the book is an account of his mysterious profound hearing loss at age 12.

Or is he seeking to show the man’s greatness by taking us back to a world pre-Edison, or by showing how difficult his family life was at times the laboratory was fruitful?

Perhaps a clue is given deep in the book, quoting Edison that “I like to begin at the large end of things. Life is too short to begin at the small end … the details grow out of the principle.”

Even deeper in the book, Morris writes, “[a]s always when diverging into a new course of experiment, he saw himself at the glorious end of it, rather than the fraught beginning.” Clever. But as a form of “scientific” discovery of Edison the man, if that is what it is, it misses the mark and clouds the history.

The psychobiography here seems clear: “Affable to every stranger who waylaid him, generous with advice even to competitors, Edison was unaware of how often he hurt the feelings of intimates.”

Edison was a man difficult to reach, often excessively demanding of others and having brutally high standards for himself, with very difficult relationships with most of his children and a number of business partners. Childhood rejection and deafness (of whatever type) likely played a significant role, and this carried over to other aspects of his life, even if it cannot fully explain his unique scientific genius.

So: pedestal toppled, idol’s clay of feet revealed. But his work endures.