Essaying Edison

The Papers of Thomas A. Edison: Competing Interests 1888-1889 The big new laboratory that Edison opened in West Orange, N.J., late in 1887 led to one of his most important inventions: the professional research director. The lab's unmatched size, equipment, supplies, and skilled staff allowed Edison to create in new ways. No longer did he have to take the lead on each problem: he could assign it to a talented man or team of men (always men). Over the next few years, Edison adapted his long...

Thomas Edison at Rutgers Old Queens, Winant Hall, 1922 Edison and Rutgers The name of Thomas Edison has been closely associated with Rutgers University since the university won a competition to host the Edison Papers. Edison himself had a personal relationship with the university, having spent a good deal of his career in close proximity to its New Brunswick campus. He received two honorary degrees from Rutgers, donated electrical apparatus to the school, and stirred up a bit of controversy among...

December 2014 marked the 125th anniversary of Mark Twain’s classic novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Since its original publication, it has been reissued innumerable times and has been adapted for film, radio, television, and even into a Rodgers-and-Hart Broadway musical. Twain wrote the novel over a three-year period in the late 1880s, just at the time Thomas A. Edison was preparing his new wax-cylinder phonograph for commercial production. News accounts of the new machine...

Thomas Edison has been connected to poetry in many ways. He was both a reader and, occasionally, a writer of poetry (albeit of a surrealistic sort). He loved Shakespeare and was partial to Longfellow. He also had poets, such as Browning and Tennyson, recorded on the phonograph reading their own works. Edison inspired poets, too, including Horatio Powers, Carl Sandburg, and Charles Cros, to write about him and his work. Among those so inspired recently was the late Clifford H. Tyler, who penned...

An unexpected piece of the past. We preserve quite a bit of material related to Thomas Edison here at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The national collections include objects related to famous successes like incandescent lamps, phonographs and motion picture equipment as well as lesser known inventions such as electric pens, alkali batteries and Edison-effect lamps. We also preserve failures like the talking doll since even Edison struck out on occasion. As one might...

Anyone who is old enough to have used a card catalog back in the pre-digital days of the twentieth century (or alternatively to have done recent research at the Pennsylvania Historical Society) will be familiar with the peculiar form of writing commonly used on catalog cards and known as "library hand." This particular specialized form of writing was developed by Melvil Dewey, who also pioneered the Dewey decimal system and the library card catalog and even designed the specialized cabinets...

Having published both his controversial authorized biography of Ronald Reagan and the third and final volume of his award-winning biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris was casting about for another life to write. His first thought was to pen a bio of the reclusive J. D. Salinger, but his agent Scott Moyers wondered whether the reading public would be interested in someone who didn't really do much but live like a monk after he published A Catcher in the Rye. Moyers instead suggested Thomas...

From Phonographs to U-Boats: Edison and His “Insomnia Squad” in Peace and War, 1911-1919 by Thomas E. Jeffrey is the guide to Part V of the microfilm edition of the Thomas A. Edison Papers. An important work of scholarship in its own right, this groundbreaking book probes an important period in Edison’s life that has received little attention in previous scholarly works. This book reveals a great deal about the inventor’s personality and methods and shows his deep personal involvement in the...

Having spent the better part of three decades as a professional jazz musician, at least on a part-time basis, I’m well aware that jazz could not really exist and continue to progress in the way it does without recording.  If there were no sound recordings, a musician could only study improvised soloing and comping by attending live performances. Jazz musicians must, of course, experience the music live to develop their own chops, but there would be no way to really dissect solos down to the...

Quick: which icon of late 19th century America described an overly-busy man as one “inebriated with industry”? Or insulted another for having “a genius for stupidity”? Or likened birds singing at sunrise to a “canary seed orchestra”? If this lively language put you in mind of Mark Twain, don’t feel bad that the author was actually Thomas Edison. The comparison occurred to me in reverse. Edison’s prose is pretty familiar from my work at the Thomas Edison Papers, so my scalp tingled recently when I...

Did Edison really electrocute Topsy the Elephant?  It is arguably the most famous animal execution ever—the killing of Topsy the elephant at Luna Park on Coney Island in January 1903.  It received national coverage in the newspapers, and the Edison Manufacturing Co. sent a film crew to document it. The execution, chiefly by electrocution, has since been the subject of articles, books, and television documentaries, and in recent times has become something of a cause célèbre.  These days it is...

Along with images from the Thomas Edison National Historical Park archives, which were scanned from Parts I-III of the microfilm edition, the digital edition contains numerous additional images from other repositories and private collections. Included are items from the AT&T Archives, Charles Edison Fund, Edison-Ford Winter Estates, Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village Research Center, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library of Congress, National Archives, New-York Historical Society, New...

When part of your daily routine is to sift through the papers of the world’s foremost inventor, you begin to expect the unexpected. Still, it’s hard not to be surprised when you come across designs for a steam-powered snow remover or an electric cigar lighter or at times a surrealistic poem in the unmistakable handwriting of the great man himself—Thomas A. Edison.  But perhaps the most surprising and enigmatic document of all is what we at the Thomas A. Edison Papers dubbed “The Scorecard.” Click here...

These towns all lay on the railroad and telegraph lines between New York and Philadelphia. Edison's first shops were in Jersey City and Newark. Clicking on the name of a city will take you to the first appearance of that city in the chronology.

This map of the eastern United States and Canada shows the cities and towns associated with Edison's youth and early career. Clicking on the name of a city will take you to the first appearance of that city in the chronology.

The Current War dramatizes the conflict of ambitions, beliefs, and money that shaped the electrical future of the United States and the world. The movie fictionalizes the rivalry between Thomas Edison (the “Wizard of Menlo Park”) and industrialist George Westinghouse in the “War of the Currents” in the late 1880s and early 1890s. There was no such thing as an electrical “grid” then—service was limited to a patchwork of power stations serving select parts of American cities. Each side...

Edison undertook this inspection trip after assuming the position of electrician for the company, which was controlled by Jay Gould. He wrote a memorandum describing the offices' equipment and personnel; it is transcribed as Doc. 539 (TAEB 2:410–14).

by Lewis Brett Smiler  Was Thomas Edison anti-Semitic?  There is no simple answer to this question.   The inventor believed in many common Jewish stereotypes, and some of his remarks about Jews can be construed as prejudice.  However, Edison also expressed support in their quest for freedom and employed them in trusted positions at his laboratory.   He once referred to Jews as a “remarkable people,” and the evidence suggests that Edison’s feelings about them were complex.[1] Henry Ford, Edison’s...