A Walk Through the Inventions of Thomas Edison

As the summer wanes and the current recession rolls on, it seems especially fitting to celebrate the life of that great inventor and jobs creator, Thomas Alva Edison. This past weekend, the National Park Service offered free tours of Edison's home and recently reopened library and laboratory, as well as kid-friendly demonstrations and activities at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange.  

Edison spent the entire second half of his life in West Orange. Though he discovered his best known inventions—the phonograph and the electric light system—in nearby Menlo Park (hence his nickname "The Wizard of Menlo Park"), he made practical improvements on both, developed motion pictures and recording devices, and earned patents on more than 500 other inventions here—hiring more than 4,000 workers to help him. 

This writer and her two kids took advantage and spent a delightful Saturday getting a "kids-eye" view of Edison's world.  

We started with the main laboratory building, which we toured with a free audio guide.  After a quick stop at the library on the first floor, where Edison and his employees would do their research on a project, we moved into the "stock room." The ideal environment for inventing, Edison felt, was to have all materials that could possibly be required on hand for his "muckers" to experiment with. There wasn't a kid in the place who could resist staring at the bins that held not only wire and widgets, but rhinoceros horns and horse hair. After hearing on the audiotape that Edison once said his stock room held "everything from elephant hide to the eyeballs of a senator," more than one 2^nd grader asks the docent present where they kept the eyeballs. He was kidding about that part, apparently.    

Next we moved into the heart of Edison's lab—the heavy machine shop. It was in this massive room filled with pulleys and lathes and belts of all kinds that Edison's muckers created models for their inventions that could then be mass produced.  Also in this room is an elevator built expressly so Mr. Edison could move through the three floors of the lab as he approached his mid-eighties. He preferred to take the stairs. 

It may interest parents already worried about how their youngest tots will fare on their college applications to know that Edison never attended high school, let alone university. From the time he was seven, his mother homeschooled him. He was a voracious reader, and at 12 took a job on the Grand Trunk Railway selling newspapers and candy to passengers; at 14 he started publishing his own newspaper out of the baggage car. His first "real" job was as a telegraph operator relaying news of the Civil War, which spurred his fascination with electronic communication.

Moving up to the second floor, we heard a docent explain how the incandescent lightbulb became a household item in this lab. The filaments in the earliest bulbs were made of cardboard and could only burn for a few minutes. Edison and his muckers devised a cotton thread that could be hardened through carbonization; it burned for 13 hours or more. They also invented light switches, electric meters, fuses, and wiring systems, all of which made electrical lighting commercially viable.

The third floor houses the music room, where Edison produced some of the earliest experimental recordings in the 1880s and 90s.  An adjacent room is a showcase of lesser known but fascinating inventions. My kids' favorite was the "talking doll," mass produced around 1890 with a miniature phonographic voice box in its chest. They loved pressing the button to hear the doll's shrill voice, which they thought sounded like "a poisoned bird." Not surprisingly, the fragile doll frequently broke and was a commercial bust.

Also on the third floor is an area with tables and chairs and plenty of Legos, blocks, and other gadgets that kids can use to create their own inventions.     

Of interest especially to adults is Glenmont, the home Edison lived in with his second wife, Mina (his first wife died) and their family for 44 years. The house, which the Edisons bought in 1886 for $125,000, is part of Llewellyn Park, the first gated community in the country. Though I especially admired the second floor library, which featured his and her desks and was used as a family room, the children on our tour were fascinated mostly with the enormous bidet in the bathroom. That and the turn-of-the-century tea party that was set up on the first floor.

If you missed the open house this year, don't despair. The house, the laboratory, the conservatory, and many of the other buildings featured on Edison Day are open throughout the year. If you're raising a young mucker of your own, it's hard to think of a more productive way to spend an afternoon.  After all, as Edison himself famously said, "Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."

Thomas Edison National Historic Park, 211 Main Street, West Orange, NJ. Laboratory Complex open Wed through Sun, 9 am to 5 pm. Glenmont Estate open Fri through Sun, 11:30 am to 5 pm. Visitors to Glenmont must stop first at the Laboratory Complex (211 Main Street) to get a parking pass.