Thomas Edison’s Places of Invention
by Paul Israel, Director and General Editor, The Thomas
Edison Papers
The skilled machinists of
Edison’s telegraph shop.
Courtesy of Edison National
Historic Site.
Thomas Edison began his career as an inventor in the
late 1860s while working as a telegraph operator, and
by the early 1870s he had achieved a reputation as one
of the industry’s leading “electromechanicians.” This
term captured both the mechanical character of 19 thcentury electrical technology like stock tickers and the
role that machine shops and skilled machinists played
in the inventive process. Rather than an enterprise of
lone individuals, 19 th-century invention involved
communities of skilled operatives, machinists,
superintendents, and manufacturers who drew on
practical experience to design, build, and refine new
technology.
Edison’s own lab reflected this. During his 1873 trip to England to demonstrate one of
his telegraph inventions, Edison encountered a sophisticated British electrical
community that designed and used fine test instruments to make precise
measurements when conducting electrical experiments and tests. With an appreciation
of how much he did not yet know about electrical and chemical phenomena involved in
telegraphy, he developed a new experimental approach. Within six months of his return
home he established a fully equipped electrical and chemical laboratory in a corner of
his Newark telegraph works, boasting that it contained “every conceivable variety of
Electrical Apparatus, and any quantity of Chemicals for experimentation.”
In this new laboratory, Edison began to focus his experiments on electrical and
electrochemical phenomena rather than on the electromechanical designs that had made
his early reputation. In this respect he was following the lead of British telegraph
engineers. However, Edison’s primary concern remained the production of new
technology rather than the standardized engineering practices and insights into the
nature of electricity that were the focus of British researchers.
By the spring of 1875, Edison decided to make his
expanding laboratory entirely independent of the
manufacturing shop and turned full-time to invention.
With the skilled workmen and tools from his Newark
telegraph shops adapted solely to inventive work, Edison
could rapidly construct, test, and alter experimental
devices, significantly increasing the rate at which he could
develop new inventions. At the end of the year he further
expanded his laboratory facilities by building his now
famous laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
Menlo Park did not mark a sharp break with the shop
tradition of invention. Instead it represented Edison’s
continuing efforts to amplify rather than replace that
tradition. The machine shop remained crucial for his
inventive work. It was for this reason that he asked
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The machine shop on the first
floor of the Menlo Park
laboratory. Courtesy of
Edison National Historic
Site.
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Western Union president William Orton to pay the running expenses of his machine
shop or “I shall be compelled to close same unless I am able to provide funds for
continuing the same and keep my skilled workmen the loss of which would seriously
cripple me.” But the laboratory, which was “filled with every kind of apparatus for
scientific research,” also looked forward to a new model of research and provided
Edison with “unusual facilities” for “perfecting” inventions. When Edison opened his
laboratory in March 1876 it was probably the best equipped private laboratory in the
United States. It was certainly the only one devoted entirely to invention. Over the next
five years, as Edison turned from telecommunications to electric light and power, he
would transform this invention factory into a true research and development
laboratory.
Between the fall of 1878 and the fall of 1879, as he turned his laboratory to solving the
problem of incandescent electric lighting, Edison added additional staff, including
several experimenters. Most notable was Francis Upton, who had received the first
master of science degree from Princeton University and then did post-graduate work
with Hermann von Helmholtz. He also hired several chemists (including two with
German Ph.D.s) and a German glassblower who had worked for a scientific instrument
maker. After a year of research, Edison and his staff succeeded in developing a basic
lamp and generator.
With the shift from research to development of the electric light system in 1880, the
staff of experimenters, machinists, and office workers expanded even more, reaching
more than fifty at its peak. Although a few experimenters, like Charles Clarke and
Julius Hornig, were hired because of their formal training as engineers, most were
ambitious young men attracted by the aura surrounding Edison and his laboratory and
who learned on the job. With teams of researchers who could work simultaneously on
all elements of the electric lighting system, Edison was able to rapidly leapfrog past his
competitors and to develop not just a laboratory prototype of a lamp or generator but
a complete commercial system of electric lighting.
Edison’s great success at the Menlo Park laboratory made it a model for others.
Alexander Graham Bell was influenced by what he called Edison’s “celebrated
laboratory at Menlo Park” when he set up his own Volta Laboratory in Washington,
D.C., in 1881. Other electrical inventors, such as Edward Weston, were also inspired by
Edison as they set up laboratories of their own. The Bell
Telephone Company likewise drew on the example of
Edison’s laboratory when it established an
experimental shop in 1883. The influence of the
laboratory even extended to the scientific community
as American and European scientists visited and found
the laboratory better equipped than their own.
The West Orange laboratory,
around 1892, “the best
equipped & largest
Laboratory extant.” Courtesy
of Edison National Historic
Site.
Smithsonian Lemelson Center
Menlo Park also provided the model for the even larger
laboratory that Edison built in West Orange, New
Jersey, in 1887, which he planned to be “the best
equipped & largest Laboratory extant, and the facilities
incomparably superior to any other for rapid & cheap
development of an invention, & working it up into
commercial shape.” Having developed a process of
research and development at Menlo Park, Edison
applied it at West Orange to a wide variety of
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technological innovations, realizing his ambition “to build up a great Industrial Works
in the Orange Valley.”
The manufacturing and experimental machine shops of the 19th century, therefore,
served as a prototype of the research laboratory. This kind of shop invention went well
beyond the simple method of cut-and-try experimentation. Nineteenth-century
inventors not only kept abreast of scientific and technical research that might contribute
to their work, but frequently undertook experiments designed to give them more
general knowledge that might prove crucial to their success.
Notes from the Director
Remarkable New Jersey!
by Arthur Molella, Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director
The cover of The Daily
Graphic of New York, 9
July 1879, pronounced
Edison a “wizard.”
New Jersey, or at least that part of it nearest New York
City, has a long history as a technological region, born out
of Thomas Edison’s laboratories, the prototypes of all
industrial research labs. They thrived with Edison at the
helm for almost fifty years. When we think of the
“Wizard of Menlo Park,” we think of electric lighting, the
phonograph, the stock ticker, and other groundbreaking
inventions that resulted from what were arguably
Edison’s most fertile
years. We seldom realize
that his famous earlier
“invention factory” in
Menlo Park (now part of
Edison Township), which
opened in 1876, existed
for a relatively short time.
Quickly outgrowing this first lab, Edison moved to
New York City in 1881 and stopped working at Menlo
Park late in 1882 (and even though he and his wife
Mary continued to use their Menlo Park home during
the summer, he turned his back on Menlo Park completely
in 1884, distraught over Mary’s premature death at the
age of twenty-nine). Fortunately, Edison had the
resources to overcome psychological, financial, and other obstacles,
and the Edison laboratories grew to even grander
proportions in West Orange, New Jersey.
Edison and Francis Jehl
After Edison abandoned Menlo Park, the complex
reenacted the evacuation of
deteriorated rapidly. When in the 1920s Henry Ford
an experimental lightbulb
wanted to honor his good friend Thomas Edison by
during the dedication
moving the Menlo Park complex lock, stock, and barrel
ceremonies for the re-created
to Dearborn, Michigan, and the new Henry Ford
Menlo Park lab at the Henry
Ford Museum and
Museum and Greenfield Village, he found almost
Greenfield Village in
nothing to preserve and ended up re-creating some of
Dearborn, Michigan, in
the original buildings. Today, a tower topped with a
1929. SI negative #87-1732.
giant lightbulb stands on Menlo Park site and Edison’s
West Orange lab is preserved as a historic site. But
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Edison’s labs left a rich legacy, not only for New Jersey but for the world.
Like inventors themselves, research laboratories seem to have a finite life span, at least
in terms of their periods of peak productivity. When we polled a group of historians
and other experts on this as part of the Lemelson Center’s “Places of Invention” project,
the consensus was a maximum period of about 20 years, a phenomenon repeated in
New Jersey (and elsewhere) at places including Bell Labs and RCA. Accounting for this
longevity, or lack thereof, is no simple task, but it has something to do with the
complex chemistry between people and place. Questioning what resources exist, how
long they last, what the competition for them is, and given those factors, how long the
institution’s way of operating can be maintained, can shed light on the underlying
causes of this pattern.
From the Collections
The Laser Turns 50
by Harold D. Wallace Jr., Associate Curator, Division of
Work and Industry, NMAH
Even after half a century the word “laser” conjures up
images of laboratories and high-tech complexity. In
National Museum of American History anniversary
showcase, “Lasers: The First Fifty Years,” I wanted to
Ebe Helm operating his laser
show the speed with which both professional and
in his high school lab, 1979.
amateur inventors embraced the device. So along with
Courtesy of Ebe Helm.
seminal inventions—a ruby laser from Theodore
Maiman, laser crystals from Peter Sorokin, and Ali
Javan’s helium-neon laser—we display a range of objects that illustrate some of the
many applications to which lasers have been adapted.
One of my favorite pieces is the gas laser assembled by teenager Ebe Helm in the
basement of his parents’ New Jersey home in 1979. Combining an interest in science
with strong mechanical aptitude, Helm first became interested in lasers by repairing a
ruby laser used in an exhibition at the Franklin Institute.
As he learned more about lasers he corresponded with
engineers in various corporate and academic
laboratories, whom Helm recalled being “very
supportive and enthusiastic.”
Working from plans published by Information
Unlimited, Helm began designing a carbon-dioxide gas
laser. In correspondence leading up to his donation of
objects to the Museum in 2005, he described the project:
Ebe Helm built this carbondioxide laser in his parents’
The tube was hand made for me by Arthur H.
basement. Photo by Harold
Thomas Co. of Philadelphia, and [an engineer
Dorwin, Smithsonian
from] Standard-Thomson Corporation provided
Institution.
the brass bellows. The brass and copper to make
the mirror mounts were given to me by South
Jersey Welding Supply and cut to my requested specs by the machine shop at
Siemens [in] Cherry Hill, N.J. The zinc selenide output mirror [and the vacuum
gauge and valves were] donated by the Valtec Corporation of Holliston, Mass.
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This allowed me to use a helium neon laser for alignment [of the optics on my
laser].
The target is a building block donated from the nursery school that my mother
operated from our home. From my earlier work on the ruby laser, I learned to
use a layered target. Plastic food wrap over carbon paper over wood, in this
case, gave a graduated indication of power output.
Helm also remembered having to reassure his mother, as he worked in his basement
lab, that the very loud noise created by a nearby train derailment was none of his doing.
But not all of his laser work happened in his basement. “I often liked to muse at the
fact,” he told us, “that I was given my own science classroom to use as a lab, not
because I was anything special, but because my teachers knew this stuff was
dangerous. High voltage, high vacuum, high pressure gas, and let's throw in laser
radiation just for good measure. I was in my glory. I think I had them all a little scared.
It was fun.”
Both Helm’s CO2 laser and the target block that shows the scars of use are currently on
display. His donation also includes the ruby laser and nearly a dozen other early
commercial lasers with which he experimented.
Inventive Ideas for Hands-On Fun
Make Your Own Lightbulb!
by Steve Madewell, Resident Eccentric, Lemelson Center
Spark!Lab
Replica of the first Edison
incandescent lamp,
displayed in 1929 at the
reconstructed Menlo Park
laboratory, Henry Ford
Museum and Greenfield
Village, Dearborn,
Michigan. Courtesy of
the Edison National
Historic Site.
Thomas Edison and his team at Menlo Park made the
electric lightbulb a reality. Just about everyone has
enjoyed the light from an incandescent descendant of
Edison’s first bulbs. From the very beginning up to the
present day, lightbulbs have quietly undergone a constant
series of innovations. But you can experience history
firsthand by building your own “Edison-style” lightbulb
at home.
Download the activity and be “brilliant”!
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Have You Seen?
Thomas Edison expanded his own talent and capabilities
by creating a research and development lab at Menlo Park
where he worked with an invention team. The strategy
paid off; when Edison died at eighty-four, he had 1,093
patents—the most of any inventor in U.S. history.
With the creation of his Menlo Park, New Jersey, lab in
1876, Edison expanded the 19th-century craft-shop
model of invention, pointing toward the corporate R&D
Edison (center) with
labs to come. “[My lab will produce] a minor invention
some of his workers at
every ten days and a big thing every six months or
Menlo Park, spring
so.” Within six years of the lab’s founding, Edison, “The
1880. Courtesy of the
Wizard of Menlo Park,” earned more than 400 patents for
Edison National Historic
a steady stream of inventions. They included the
Site.
phonograph, a carbon telephone transmitter (the
microphone in the telephone mouthpiece), the first practical incandescent lightbulb, and
the electrical generating and transmitting system to make the lightbulb commercially
feasible and successful.
You can read more about Thomas Edison’s life on our Edison Invents! website, and see a
re-creation of the first recording and playback of sound on the phonograph, too!
Prototype Online Inventive Voices Podcast
When Hollywood Was in New Jersey
Ryan
Lintelman in the
collections. Photo courtesy
of Ryan Lintelman.
Hollywood wasn’t always the glitzy heart of America’s
film industry. It was born in the 1880s in West Orange,
New Jersey, at Thomas Edison’s state-of-the-art labs.
Ryan Lintelman, research specialist in photographic
history at the National Museum of American History, sets
the stage in this podcast, describing revolutionary
developments in filming, projecting, and producing
motion pictures made by Edison and his remarkable
assistant, W. K. L. Dickson. Lintelman traces the early
growth and movement of an industry from Edison’s first
motion picture studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, to
sunny (and then-sleepy) Southern California.
Tune in!
Prototype, March 2010
Copyright 2010 Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.
All Rights Reserved. 14th Street and Constitution Ave. NW, Washington DC 20560.
Contact us at [email protected].
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There’s more online:
Lemelson Center website
National Museum of American History Frequently Asked Questions
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