Thomas Edison Memorial Hall

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• Marion "Dot" Estelle Edison (1873-1965)
• Thomas "Dash" Alva Edison, Jr (1876-1935)
• William Leslie Edison (1878-1935)

Mary Edison died on August 9 1884.

On February 24, 1886, at the age of thirty-nine, Edison married 20-year-old Mina Miller in Akron, Ohio. They also had three children:

• Madeleine Edison (1888-1979)
• Charles Edison (1890-1969), who took over the company upon his father's death and who later was elected Governor of New Jersey
• Theodore Edison (1898-1992)

Mina outlived Thomas Edison, dying on August 24, 1947.

Beginning His Career

Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey, with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention which first gained him fame was the phonograph in 1877. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," New Jersey, where he lived. His first phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder and had poor sound quality. The tinfoil recordings could only be replayed a few times. In the 1880s, a redesigned model using wax-coated cardboard cylinders was produced by Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, and Charles Tainter. This was one reason that Thomas Edison continued work on his own "Perfected Phonograph."

Thomas Edison was a freethinker, and was most likely a deist, claiming he did not believe in "the God of the theologians," but did not doubt that "there is a Supreme Intelligence." He is quoted, "I believe that the science of chemistry alone almost proves the existence of an intelligent creator." However, he rejected the idea of the supernatural, along with such ideas as the soul, immortality, and a personal God. He maintained a position on the supernatural and the Christian religion that was best described as "truculent agnosticism." "Nature," he said, "is not merciful and loving, but wholly merciless, indifferent."

Menlo Park

Edison's major innovation was the first industrial research lab, which was built in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It was the first institution set up with the specific purpose of producing constant technological innovation and improvement. Edison was legally attributed with most of the inventions produced there, though many employees carried out research and development work under his direction.

William Joseph Hammer, a consulting electrical engineer, began his duties as a laboratory assistant to Edison in December 1879. He assisted in experiments on the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting, and other developing inventions. However, Hammer worked primarily on the incandescent electric lamp and was put in charge of tests and records on that device. In 1880 he was appointed Chief Engineer of the Edison Lamp Works. In his first year, the plant under general manager Francis Robbins Upton turned out 50,000 lamps. According to Edison, Hammer was "a pioneer of incandescent electric lighting."

Most of Edison's patents were utility patents, which during Edison's lifetime protected for a 17 year period inventions or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or chemical in nature. About a dozen were design patents, which protect an ornamental design for a 14 year period. Like most inventions, his were not typically completely original, but improvements to prior art. The phonograph patent, on the other hand, was unprecedented as the first device to record and reproduce sounds. Edison did not invent the first electric light bulb, but instead invented the first commercially practical incandescent light. Several designs had already been developed by earlier inventors including the patent he purchased from Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, Moses G. Farmer, Joseph Swan, James Bowman Lindsay, William Sawyer, Sir Humphry Davy, and Heinrich Gobel. Some of these early bulbs had such flaws as extremely short life, high expense to produce, and high current draw, making them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially. In 1878, Edison applied the term filament to the element of glowing wire carrying the current, although English inventor Joseph Swan had used the term prior to this. Edison took the features of these earlier designs and set his workers to the task of creating longer-lasting bulbs. By 1879, he had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours. While the earlier inventors had produced electric lighting in laboratory conditions dating back to a demonstration of a glowing wire by Alessandro Volta in 1800, Edison concentrated on commercial application and was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting light bulbs and creating a complete system for the generation and distribution of electricity.

The Menlo Park research lab was made possible by the sale of the quadruplex telegraph that Edison invented in 1874, which could send four simultaneous telegraph signals over the same wire. When Edison asked Western Union to make an offer, he was shocked at the unexpectedly large amount that Western Union offered; the patent rights were sold for $10,000. The quadruplex telegraph was Edison's first big financial success.

In just over a decade Edison's Menlo Park laboratory had expanded to consume two city blocks. Edison said he wanted the lab to have "a stock of almost every conceivable material." A newspaper article printed in 1887 reveals the seriousness of his claim, stating the lab contained "eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses, hogs, cows, rabbits goats, minx, camels... silk in every texture, cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark's teeth, deer horns, tortoise shell...cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock's tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores..." and the list goes on.

With Menlo Park Edison had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application.

Incandescent Era

In 1878, Edison formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan and the members of the Vanderbilt family. Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park. On January 27, 1880, he filed a patent in the United States for the electric incandescent lamp; it was during this time that he said, "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."

On October 8, 1883, the U.S. patent office ruled that Edison's patent was based on the work of William Sawyer and was therefore invalid. Litigation continued for nearly six years, until October 6, 1889, when a judge ruled that Edison's electric light improvement claim for "a filament of carbon of high resistance" was valid. To avoid a possible court battle with Joseph Swan, whose English patent had been awarded a year before Edison's, he and Swan formed a joint company called Ediswan to market the invention in Britain.

Edison patented an electric distribution system in 1880, which was critical to capitalize on the invention of the electric lamp. The first investor-owned electric utility was the 1882 Pearl Street Station, New York City. It was on September 4, 1882, that Edison switched on his Pearl Street generating station's electrical power distribution system, which provided 110 volts direct current (DC) to 59 customers in lower Manhattan. Earlier in the year, in January 1882 he had switched on the first steam generating power station at Holborn Viaduct in London in the UK. The DC supply system provided electricity supplies to street lamps and a number of private dwellings within a short distance of the station.

On January 19, 1883, the first standardized incandescent electric lighting system employing overhead wires began service in Roselle, New Jersey.

Later Years

Edison became the owner of his Milan, Ohio, birthplace in 1906, and, on his last visit, in 1923, he was shocked to find his old home still lit by lamps and candles. Influenced by a fad diet that was popular in the day, in his last few years "the only liquid he consumed was a pint of milk every three hours." He believed this diet would restore his health.

Edison was active in business right up to the end. Just months before his death in 1931, the Lackawanna Railroad implemented electric trains in suburban service from Hoboken to Gladstone, Montclair and Dover in New Jersey. Transmission was by means of an overhead catenary system, with the entire project under the guidance of Thomas Edison. To the surprise of many, Thomas Edison was at the throttle of the very first MU (Multiple-Unit) train to depart Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, driving the train all the way to Dover. As another tribute to his lasting legacy, the very same fleet of cars Edison deployed on the Lackawanna in 1931 served commuters until their retirement in 1984. A special plaque commemorating the joint achievement of both the railway and Edison, can be seen today in the waiting room of Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, presently operated by New Jersey Transit.

Edison purchased a home known as "Glenmont" in 1886 as a wedding gift for Mina in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey. The remains of Edison and his wife, Mina, are now buried there. The 13.5 acre property is maintained by the National Park Service as the Edison National Historic Site. Thomas Edison died on October 18, 1931, in New Jersey at the age of 84. His final words to his wife were "It is very beautiful over there." Mina died in 1947. Edison's last breath is reportedly contained in a test tube at the Henry Ford Museum. Ford reportedly convinced Charles Edison to seal a test tube of air in the inventor's room shortly after his death, as a memento. A plaster death mask was also made.

In the 1880s, Thomas Edison bought property in Fort Myers, Florida, and built Seminole Lodge as a winter retreat. Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, later lived a few hundred feet away from Edison at his winter retreat, The Mangoes. Edison even contributed technology to the automobile. They were friends until Edison's death.