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“We’re finding new things to research all the time,” Cosden explains. “We have people reaching out to us to make donations, most recently a vintage Ford car and some Edison legal documents someone found in their attic. Our first initiative was to address the homes, and that’s done. Next was to address the laboratory, and that’s done. Now we’re onto the museum, making things more interactive and providing more opportunities for children to get involved.” When you dig deeper into the relationship between Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, you find that Ford was once an employee of Edison — and later, Edison his greatest mentor. And while Ford focused on perfecting automation
his time again), which led to the development of today’s alkaline batteries.
But perhaps his most beloved invention was the phonograph. “Edison loved music,” Janet Wilson notes, “but ironically, he was 90% deaf. To hear or feel the music through vibration, he built a wooden box around a phonograph and he’d bite the wood. We have one of those in the museum, and you can see the teeth marks.”
Edison was also convinced that many of the world’s challenges,
from manufacturing to medicine, could be solved by the power of plants. In 1927, Edison, Ford and Harvey Firestone formed the Edison Botanical Research Corporation and built the Botanical Laboratory — still in its original setting — one of the highlights of your visit. The lab has been
“Edison loved music, but ironically, he was 90% deaf. To hear or feel the music through vibration, he built a wooden box around a phonograph and he’d bite the wood.”
via the assembly line, Edison was an inventor with few equals, and held more than 1,000 patents worldwide.
named a National Historic Chemical Landmark, and is one of the few Edison labs in the nation with such an honor. It was here (and his lab in New Jersey) that Thomas Edison and his researchers tested 17,000 plant samples, in search of finding a plant that could produce natural rubber in America, in case of war or crisis. “There were acres of research plants surrounding the lab,” Debbie Hughes notes. “They dried plants, ground them down and then began chemical tests on them to extract rubber. Edison looked at plants
Although he didn’t invent the light bulb, he did invent filament that improved the incandescent bulb. He also invented an improved stock ticker, an improved telephone, the first fluoroscope (yes, he played with x-rays), the first motion picture devices (he actually has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and his film production company, Edison Studios, put out more than 1,000 movies), a laundry list of electric lighting system components, the first office dictation device, and improved storage batteries that powered early electric cars (ahead of
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