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Ore Milling
Employing remarkable team work and persistence Edison spent much of the 1890s designing machinery to mine and process iron ore at his Ogdensburg, New Jersey, ore milling plant, a project that ultimately failed. -
Motion Pictures
Edison’s 1888 idea of inventing an instrument “which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion” led to the creation of the movie industry. At West Orange, Edison and his team invented a motion picture camera, built studios to... -
A Phonograph in Every Home
Turning the tinfoil phonograph from a curiosity into a commercial product became a major project at West Orange. From the late 1880s to the 1920s Edison’s lab designed talking machines for office workers and produced phonographs and records that provided millions of consumers with pre-recorded... -
Battle of the Systems
The competition between Edison's direct-current (DC) central station system and new alternating current (AC) systems, especially the Westinghouse system using Nikola Tesla's important improvements, becomes intertwined with the debate over humane executions and the development of the electric chair.
