The Wizard's Workshop, Edison, Menlo Park, and West Orange

In the spring of eighteen seventy-six, a twenty-nine-year-old inventor with a partially deaf ear and ink-stained fingers moved into a two-story white frame building in the quiet Middlesex County hamlet of Menlo Park, New Jersey. Thomas Alva Edison had just leased the place, set up a machine shop on the ground floor and a chemical laboratory on the second, hired a handful of machinists and scientists, and announced that he intended to produce a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so. What followed over the next eight years was genuinely without precedent.

The phonograph came out of Menlo Park in eighteen seventy-seven, and it stunned the scientific world, sound had never been recorded and played back before, not once in human history. Two years later, on October twenty-first, eighteen seventy-nine, Edison demonstrated a practical incandescent electric light bulb that burned for thirteen and a half hours. The light itself was not entirely new in concept, but what Edison built was an entire system: the dynamo, the distribution network, the metered circuits.

Within three years, a power station on Pearl Street in Manhattan was lighting dozens of customers. Edison patented approximately four hundred inventions during his Menlo Park years. When the operation outgrew those modest buildings, Edison built an enormous new complex in West Orange in eighteen eighty-seven, ten times the size of Menlo Park, housing a main laboratory of three stories flanked by four specialized one-story buildings for physics, chemistry, and metallurgy.

More than half of Edison's lifetime total of one thousand ninety-three patents came out of West Orange, including the motion picture camera and the alkaline storage battery. The site is preserved today as the Thomas Edison National Historical Park. New Jersey gave Edison the space and the quiet to think.

He gave New Jersey, and the world, the modern age of electric light and recorded sound.