Edison’s experience as a reliable telegraph inventor and the support of telegraph industry leaders gave him the resources to open his first R&D lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he vowed to turn out a minor invention every six weeks and a major invention every six months. Thanks to Rutgers Public History intern Ammi Gonzales for her help editing links and PDF files for this essay.
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Thomas A. Edison and Menlo Park
Edison didn’t just invent at Menlo Park – he had been inventing for years before and went on to invent for years after he left. But while living there, he invented the phonograph and incandescent light – two modern miracles earning him the nickname “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” The lab at Menlo Park... -
The Move to Menlo
Prior to Edison's association with Menlo Park, it was a small, relatively unknown country hamlet on the Pennsylvania Railroad line from New York to Philadelphia. In the years before the move, Edison's laboratory and shops were in rented buildings in Newark. We don’t know why Edison moved out of... -
The Edison Home in Menlo Park
When Edison moved to Menlo Park, he was married to Mary Stillwell and had two children, his daughter Marion and his infant son, Thomas Jr. Edison wanted to live near his new laboratory with his family and they moved into a three-story frame house that had previously been the office of the Menlo... -
Building the Lab
Edison's newly built laboratory at Menlo Park cost $2,500 (about $50,000 in today's money). The white, two-story laboratory building was completed on 25 March 1876, and Edison moved in a few days later. The ground floor housed a machine shop with precision tools and a scientific and chemical... -
Supporting the Laboratory
A year after building his laboratory, Edison needed more money to keep it operating. Because most of his experimental work was on improving telegraph and telephone technology for Western Union, he wrote to company president William Orton to ask for help. He explained that "the cost of running my... -
Expanding the Laboratory
Funding from Western Union and then from Edison Speaking Phonograph allowed Edison to increase his staff from the original small group to 25 men by the spring of 1878. The new employees included four experimenters, a couple of general laboratory assistants, six machinists, a patternmaker, a... -
Operating the Laboratory
In the early years at Menlo Park, Edison was involved in all the ongoing research and projects. As Edison recalled in one testimony (p. 39) "Suggestions generally came from me. If any change was to be made, my assistants would speak to me about it, and if I thought best the change was made." ... -
Working at Menlo Park
Edison made Menlo Park a fun place to work. Practical jokes, tests of strength, such as a competition over who could produce the highest voltage with a hand-cranked generator, late night meals and beer, playing the laboratory pipe organ (which Edison had been given for his phonograph experiments), and telling...
