The Lab Comes to Greenfield Village

Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory complex and the inventions he made there are over 100 years old. When Edison built the laboratory in 1876, it was the first industrial research laboratory in the United States.

By 1886, Edison and his entire team had abandoned the Menlo Park site. In the 1920s, Henry Ford wanted to move the old "invention factory" to his museum in Dearborn, Michigan. When Ford and Edison went to New Jersey to recover the buildings, they found that most of them had been removed or had collapsed. Ford had his staff reconstruct the Menlo Park buildings from photographs and a few surviving original materials.

Thomas Edison's Inventions

While working on the phonograph, Edison began working on a device that "does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear;" this was to become motion pictures. Edison first demonstrated motion pictures in 1891, and began commercial production of "movies" two years later in a peculiar looking structure built on the lab-oratory grounds, known as the Black Maria. Like the electric light and phonograph before it, Edison developed a complete system developing everything needed to both film and show motion pictures. Edison's initial work in motion pictures was pioneering and original. However, many people became interested in this third new industry Edison created, and worked to further improve on Edison's early motion picture work. There were therefore many contributors to the swift development of motion pictures beyond the early work of Edison. By thelate 1890s, a thriving new industry was firmly established, and by 1918, the industry had become so competitive that Edison got out of the movie business all together.

The success of the phonograph and motion pictures in the 1890s helped offset the greatest failure of Edison's career. Throughout the decade, Edison worked in his laboratory and in the old iron mines of northwestern New Jersey to develop methods of mining iron ore to feed the insatiable demand of the Pennsylvania steel mills. To finance this work, Edison sold all his stock in General Electric. Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, Edison was never able to make the process commercially practical, and lost all the money he had invested. This would have meant financial ruin had not Edison continued to develop the phonograph and motion pictures at the same time. As it was, Edison entered the new century still financially secure and ready to take on another challenge.

Edison's new challenge was to develop a better storage battery for use in electric vehicles. Edison very much enjoyed automobiles and owned a number of different types during his life, powered by gasoline, electricity and steam. Edison thought that electric propulsion was clearly the best method of powering cars, but realized that conventional lead-acid storage batteries were inadequate for the job. Edison began to develop an alkaline battery in 1899. It proved to be Edison's most difficult project, taking ten years to develop a practical alkaline battery. By the time Edison introduced new alkaline battery, the gasoline powered car had been so improved that electric vehicles were becoming increasingly less common, being used mainly as delivery vehicles in cities. However, the Edison alkaline battery proved useful for lighting railroad cars and signals, maritime buoys and miners' lamps. Unlike iron ore mining the heavy investment Edison made over ten years was repaid handsomely, and the storage battery eventually be-came Edison's most profitable product. Further, Edison's work paved the way for the modern alkaline battery.

By 1911, Thomas Edison had built a vast industrial operation in West Orange.

Like Ben Franklin, Thomas Alva Edison was both a scientist and an inventor. Born in 1847, Edison would see tremendous change take place in his lifetime. He was also to be responsible for making many of those changes occur. When Edison was born society still thought of electricity as a novelty, tad. By the time he died, en-tire cities were lit by electricity. Much of the credit for that progress goes to Edison. In his lifetime, Edison patented 1,093 inventions, earning him the nickname "The Wizard of Menlo Park." The most famous of his inventions was an incandescent light bulb. Besides the light bulb, Edison developed the phonograph and the "kinetoscope," a small box for viewing moving films. He also improved upon the original design of the stock ticker, the telegraph and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. He believed in hard work, sometimes working twenty hours a day.

Edison was quoted as saying, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." In tribute to this important American, electric lights in the United States were dimmed for one minute on October 21, 1931, a few days after his death.