The Keystone Corner: Thomas Edison Turns Two

Thomas Edison didn’t invent baseball any more than Abner Doubleday did. But his interest in the game might hold the key to unlocking a surprising secret.

The Deadball Era was a time when pitchers threw hundreds of innings, home runs were rare, and the game was played spikes up, a time marked by the consolidation of Major League Baseball, initial moves toward its antitrust exemption, development of the Doubleday myth, and the arrival of The Bambino—all things that would change the game forever.

But baseball is always a reflection of the times in which it is played, and the Deadball Era was much more than a frame for the game. It was a time of seismic technological, social, and political change—an era of firsts. Powered flight. Large-scale assembly lines. The Panama Canal. The birth of American Empire. And so much more.

And just as baseball had its larger than life personalities—Mathewson, Cobb, Wagner, Ruth—so, too, did the larger world. Roosevelt. Ford. The Wright Brothers. Einstein. But one man of an earlier day stood out well into this new era, perhaps because he literally invented much of it. That man was a diehard baseball fan—Thomas Edison.

Fresh from his victory in The Federal Case, young attorney Andy Dennum and his cartographer girlfriend, Keiley Barefoot, use Edison’s love of baseball to uncover the secrets hidden in the estate of the inventor’s last surviving offspring, “Uncle Frank” Culbertson. You won’t believe what they find.