Milan, Ohio: Where Edison Began

The small brick cottage on the edge of Milan, Ohio, was built in eighteen forty-one, and on February eleventh, eighteen forty-seven, Thomas Alva Edison was born inside it. He is the most prolific inventor in American history, holding one thousand and ninety-three patents, a record that still stands.

The Edison family arrived in Milan under unusual circumstances. Thomas's father, Samuel, had fled Canada after participating in a failed rebellion against British rule in eighteen thirty-seven. He settled his family in Milan partly because it was a boom town. The Milan Canal, completed in eighteen thirty-nine, connected the town to Lake Erie and transformed it almost overnight into one of the busiest grain ports in the country. Milan was shipping more wheat than any American city except Chicago. The smell of grain and the noise of the canal dominated the town where young Edison spent his first seven years.

Then the railroad came, but it bypassed Milan, running through neighboring Norwalk instead. Almost as quickly as it had risen, the canal economy collapsed. The Edisons relocated to Port Huron, Michigan in eighteen fifty-four. Thomas was seven years old.

The rest of his life moved through Port Huron, Newark, Menlo Park, and West Orange, through the phonograph in eighteen seventy-seven, the practical incandescent light bulb in eighteen seventy-nine, the motion picture camera in the eighteen nineties, and the world's first industrial research laboratory. He created the template for organized invention: a team of specialists, systematic experimentation, and commercial application as the goal from the start.

His daughter Madeleine opened the Milan birthplace as a museum on February eleventh, nineteen forty-seven, the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-five. The canal that made Milan prosperous enough to attract the Edison family is gone. The house that produced Edison remains, the most consequential thing to come out of a town that almost was, on the banks of a waterway that no longer runs.