[Three letters were added to this collection in August 2012. They are attachments to a letter to Mina Edison from inventor and mathematician Albert Hamilton Kennedy.]

These documents, which cover the years 1893 and 1901-1931, consist of letters and other items sent to Thomas Edison and Mina Miller Edison from numerous non-family members. Included are invitations, acknowledgments, letters of appreciation, and other courtesies. Among the correspondents are naturalist John Burroughs; industrialists Sidney Colgate, Henry Ford, and Charles M. Schwab; tea and coffee magnate Thomas Lipton; longtime Edison friend William Thomson; reformer Helen Francis Garrison Villard; and New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson. Also included are letters by Henry A. Coit, founding rector of St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, and John G. MacVicar, headmaster of the Montclair Academy in New Jersey, concerning the education of sons William L. Edison and Theodore M. Edison; a letter from 1929 relating to the health of daughter Madeleine Edison Sloane; and an itinerary for a trip to Alaska, arranged in 1923 for Mina and Theodore Edison.

Most of the letters are from a correspondence book, not on the Charles Edison Fund microfilm, bearing the title "Letters of Prominent People Writing to Mina and Thomas Edison." There are also letters from Books #4, #10, #15, #25, and #36 on the microfilm. Click here for a list of all the correspondence books on the microfilm. Click here for a list of other books containing correspondence not on the microfilm.

Courtesy of the Charles Edison Fund.