Edison, New Jersey: The Invention Factory

You are near what was once the most productive patch of ground in the history of American invention. In the spring of eighteen seventy-six, a twenty-nine-year-old Thomas Edison moved his team of machinists and chemists into a two-and-a-half-story wooden laboratory here in the rural hamlet of Menlo Park, twelve miles south of Newark. He called it his invention factory, and the name was not boastful. It was the world's first purpose-built research and development facility, a place where a full team of specialists could work in parallel on multiple problems at once.

The results came fast. In November of eighteen seventy-seven, while tinkering with ways to record telegraph signals, Edison and his assistant Charles Batchelor realized they could capture the human voice itself. Edison spoke the opening lines of Mary Had a Little Lamb into a diaphragm attached to a needle, and the needle pressed its impression into tinfoil wrapped around a spinning cylinder. When they played it back, the room fell silent. The phonograph had no precedent in human experience. A machine that could store and replay sound was, to most people who heard it, simply impossible.

Two years later came the invention that rewired the world. Edison spent the summer and fall of eighteen seventy-nine testing over a thousand different filament materials, looking for one that would glow steadily without burning out. On October twenty-second of that year, a carbon filament held the current for about thirteen and a half hours. On New Year's Eve, Edison lit up the streets of Menlo Park with electric light. The Pennsylvania Railroad ran special excursion trains so crowds could come watch, and they did, by the hundreds.

The Menlo Park laboratory produced over three hundred patents in six years. In nineteen fifty-four, Raritan Township voted to rename itself Edison, honoring the man who had turned a muddy New Jersey crossroads into the birthplace of the modern world.