Thomas Edison National Historical Park ⓘ

Thomas Edison resided at Glenmont, his 29 room Victorian mansion, for over half of his lifetime. Its architect, Henry Hudson Holly, is considered to be the father of the Queen-Anne style architectural movement in the United States. Holly's crowning achievement, Glenmont, was part of a working estate which presently contains six outbuildings, including a barn and a greenhouse. Examples of Thomas Edison's poured concrete structures, the auto garage and the potting shed, are also still in existence.

The interior of the fully furnished Victorian home is a rare example of Pottier & Stymus interiors, a New York decorating firm that lost the majority of its records in a catastrophic warehouse fire in the year 1888. Glenmont's interiors display rare examples of the firm's modern Gothic style furniture suites and also include decorative arts objects chosen by the company to outfit this home in in Victorian style. The Edison family appreciated the original interiors, consequently making only minimal changes to the home's decoration during their residency.

Glenmont's period rooms reflect examples of the era's Eastlake style and Aesthetic Movement style interiors. The first floor library boasts hand stenciled walls in flat, stylized floral patterns with a ceiling of distemperment. Tall case cabinets store leather bound volumes.

The decorative arts collection at Glenmont ranges from major works of art and sculpture to everyday objects. The collection, consisting of 40,000 items, includes remarkable examples of Hudson River School artists, Tiffany & Co. clocks, French porcelains, and Persian rugs.

Examples of more utilitarian collection items include the Edison china collection, still housed in the historic Butler's Pantry, the household linen collection, family toiletry items, books, and household receipts that detail purchases made by the Edison family. These vouchers reveal to us the Edisons' choice of household products and also their spending habits.

The Glenmont collection also includes rare examples of Edison family memorabilia such as photographs, awards, and family mementos. Examples of Edison inventions are also represented. These artifacts offer us valuable information about Edison's private life, his status as an icon, and they also reveal how he intertwined his products and inventions with his personal life at Glenmont.

Below you will find an overview of collections mainly at the Laboratory complex. For a review of the Glenmont Estate collections, please click here .

I. Laboratory furnishings and equipment – including technical and scientific equipment, shop machinery, office and library furnishings, stock, raw materials and chemicals, used at the West Orange laboratory by Edison, his colleagues and workers, 1887-1931. Also, similar material associated with: pre-West Orange Edison laboratory facilities; Thomas A. Edison Inc. and McGraw-Edison site operations from 1931-1972; and Edison company manufacturing operations in West Orange and elsewhere.

II. Manufactured goods, and materials associated with the research and development of manufactured goods, produced by Edison, his colleagues and enterprises:

i. Phonographs, including Edison tinfoil phonographs from 1877–1880, Edison cylinder phonographs from 1887–1929, Edison disc phonographs from 1912–1930, Edison dictation machines from 1905–1970, and competitor (non-Edison) phonographs from 1890s–1920s; phonograph parts, manufacturing tools and equipment; and sound recording equipment.

ii. Electrical lighting, distribution and power equipment – including incandescent lamps, dynamos, fuses, insulators, meters, motors, switches, and rheostats. An extensive collection of the earliest light bulbs.

iii. Motion picture cameras, projectors and associated equipment, including prototypes and experimental equipment.

iv. Other products and innovations include Edicraft electrical appliances, batteries, cement manufacture, ore milling, rubber extraction, telephone and telegraph apparatus, and radios.

III. Manufactured goods made by competing manufacturers and contemporary inventors that relate to goods produced by Edison, his colleagues and enterprises.

IV. Edisonia objects that reflect Edison's role as a cultural icon, including commemorative plaques, busts, and related commercial art; commemorative reproduction inventions and products; non-Edison consumer goods that evoke the Edison name and/or image; souvenirs, and ephemeral mementos.

V. Historic fabric – including original fabric removed from a historic structure during a preservation or repair project.

VI. Historic plant specimens - These include plant specimens collected and tested by Thomas A. Edison for domestic rubber research in the 1920's.

VII. The Archeology collection consists of architectural and industrial artifacts, hardware, fuel, fauna, and domestic and commercial glass recovered from the Laboratory Complex and Glenmont Estate excavation units.

The National Park Service preserves approximately 28,000 disc phonograph records, 11,000 cylinder phonograph records, and 9800 disc metal molds at Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

In 2005 Thomas Edison NHP completed a ten-year project to relocate, re-house, and catalog the disc and cylinder record collections that have been at the Edison Laboratory since its donation to the National Park Service in 1956. These 39,000 phonograph records are now stored in a large walk-in refrigerator, temperature and humidity controlled, secured with intrusion and fire protection systems. The collection is meticulously organized, each item housed in an archival container and individually cataloged in a MARC-format database .

Thomas Edison NHP received the collection of 9800 disc metal molds as a donation from The Henry Ford of Dearborn, Michigan in 2001. Originally stored in Vault 32 of the Edison Phonograph Works in West Orange, New Jersey, plans are underway to build a new vault for the collection. The disc metal mold collection is not yet cataloged and is currently inaccessible.

Work is in progress to digitize and preserve the park's "brown wax" phonograph records. In March 2010 the Friends of Thomas Edison NHP purchased equipment and consultant services needed to modernize Thomas Edison NHP's audio preservation transfer workstation. The John Stratton Trust (Stephen R. Clark, executor), David Giovannoni, and Whole Foods Market donated a combined total of $14,283 to fund the upgrade. The new equipment includes a Mac Pro computer with RAID-1 hard drive redundancy, an LTO-4 external tape drive for data storage, associated software, and a workbench. Thomas Edison NHP is now able to create and store high-resolution digital audio files in Broadcast Wave format at 96 kHz sample rate and 24 bit depth, bringing the park up to date with the archival profession's current preservation standards.

Over 100 digitized recordings from the archive can be heard in MP3 format from the " Listen to Edison Sound Recordings " page of the Thomas Edison NHP website. A much larger number of recordings from the Thomas Edison NHP archive are available via the " Thomas Edison's Attic " radio program website. The " Thomas Edison's Attic " radio program aired from May 2003 until October 2007 on WFMU, a non-profit radio station in Jersey City, New Jersey. Click here for a list of current compact discs that include recordings from the Thomas Edison NHP sound archive. If you have questions about the Edison recorded sound archive, email us .

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio; the seventh and last child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. When Edison was seven his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Edison lived here until he struck out on his own at the age of sixteen. Edison had very little formal education as a child, attending school only for a few months. He was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, but was always a very curious child and taught himself much by reading on his own. This belief in self-improvement remained throughout his life.

Edison began working at an early age, as most boys did at the time. At thirteen he took a job as a newsboy, selling newspapers and candy on the local railroad that ran through Port Huron to Detroit. He seems to have spent much of his free time reading scientific, and technical books, and also had the opportunity at this time to learn how to operate a telegraph. By the time he was sixteen, Edison was proficient enough to work as a telegrapher full time.

The development of the telegraph was the first step in the communication revolution, and the telegraph industry expanded rapidly in the second half of the 19th century. This rapid growth gave Edison and others like him a chance to travel, see the country, and gain experience. Edison worked in a number of cities throughout the United States before arriving in Boston in 1868. Here Edison began to change his profession from telegrapher to inventor. He received his first patent on an electric vote recorder, a device intended for use by elected bodies such as Congress to speed the voting process. This invention was a commercial failure. Edison resolved that in the future he would only invent things that he was certain the public would want.

Edison moved to New York City in 1869. He continued to work on inventions related to the telegraph, and developed his first successful invention, an improved stock ticker called the "Universal Stock Printer". For this and some related inventions Edison was paid $40,000. This gave Edison the money he needed to set up his first small laboratory and manufacturing facility in Newark, New Jersey in 1871. During the next five years, Edison worked in Newark inventing and manufacturing devices that greatly improved the speed and efficiency of the telegraph. He also found to time to get married to Mary Stilwell and start a family.

In 1876 Edison sold all his Newark manufacturing concerns and moved his family and staff of assistants to the small village of Menlo Park, twenty-five miles southwest of New York City. Edison established a new facility containing all the equipment necessary to work on any invention. This research and development laboratory was the first of its kind anywhere; the model for later, modern facilities such as Bell Laboratories, this is sometimes considered to be Edison's greatest invention. Here Edison began to change the world.

The first great invention developed by Edison in Menlo Park was the tin foil phonograph. The first machine that could record and reproduce sound created a sensation and brought Edison international fame. Edison toured the country with the tin foil phonograph, and was invited to the White House to demonstrate it to President Rutherford B. Hayes in April 1878.

Edison next undertook his greatest challenge, the development of a practical incandescent, electric light. The idea of electric lighting was not new, and a number of people had worked on, and even developed forms of electric lighting. But up to that time, nothing had been developed that was remotely practical for home use. Edison's eventual achievement was inventing not just an incandescent electric light, but also an electric lighting system that contained all the elements necessary to make the incandescent light practical, safe, and economical. After one and a half years of work, success was achieved when an incandescent lamp with a filament of carbonized sewing thread burned for thirteen and a half hours. The first public demonstration of the Edison's incandescent lighting system was in December 1879, when the Menlo Park laboratory complex was electrically lighted. Edison spent the next several years creating the electric industry. In September 1882, the first commercial power station, located on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, went into operation providing light and power to customers in a one square mile area; the electric age had begun.

The success of his electric light brought Edison to new heights of fame and wealth, as electricity spread around the world. Edison's various electric companies continued to grow until in 1889 they were brought together to form Edison General Electric. Despite the use of Edison in the company title however, Edison never controlled this company. The tremendous amount of capital needed to develop the incandescent lighting industry had necessitated the involvement of investment bankers such as J.P. Morgan. When Edison General Electric merged with its leading competitor Thompson-Houston in 1892, Edison was dropped from the name, and the company became simply General Electric.

This period of success was marred by the death of Edison's wife Mary in 1884. Edison's involvement in the business end of the electric industry had caused Edison to spend less time in Menlo Park. After Mary's death, Edison was there even less, living instead in New York City with his three children. A year later, while vacationing at a friends house in New England, Edison met Mina Miller and fell in love. The couple was married in February 1886 and moved to West Orange, New Jersey where Edison had purchased an estate, Glenmont, for his bride. Thomas Edison lived here with Mina until his death.

When Edison moved to West Orange, he was doing experimental work in makeshift facilities in his electric lamp factory in nearby Harrison, New Jersey. A few months after his marriage, however, Edison decided to build a new laboratory in West Orange itself, less than a mile from his home. Edison possessed both the resources and experience by this time to build, "the best equipped and largest laboratory extant and the facilities superior to any other for rapid and cheap development of an invention ". The new laboratory complex consisting of five buildings opened in November 1887. A three story main laboratory building contained a power plant, machine shops, stock rooms, experimental rooms and a large library. Four smaller one story buildings built perpendicular to the main building contained a physics lab, chemistry lab, metallurgy lab, pattern shop, and chemical storage. The large size of the laboratory not only allowed Edison to work on any sort of project, but also allowed him to work on as many as ten or twenty projects at once. Facilities were added to the laboratory or modified to meet Edison's changing needs as he continued to work in this complex until his death in 1931. Over the years, factories to manufacture Edison inventions were built around the laboratory. The entire laboratory and factory complex eventually covered more than twenty acres and employed 10,000 people at its peak during World War One (1914-1918).

After opening the new laboratory, Edison began to work on the phonograph again, having set the project aside to develop the electric light in the late 1870s. By the 1890s, Edison began to manufacture phonographs for both home, and business use. Like the electric light, Edison developed everything needed to have a phonograph work, including records to play, equipment to record the records, and equipment to manufacture the records and the machines. In the process of making the phonograph practical, Edison created the recording industry. The development and improvement of the phonograph was an ongoing project, continuing almost until Edison's death.

While working on the phonograph, Edison began working on a device that, "does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear", this was to become motion pictures. Edison first demonstrated motion pictures in 1891, and began commercial production of "movies" two years later in a peculiar looking structure, built on the laboratory grounds, known as the Black Maria. Like the electric light and phonograph before it, Edison developed a complete system, developing everything needed to both film and show motion pictures. Edison's initial work in motion pictures was pioneering and original. However, many people became interested in this third new industry Edison created, and worked to further improve on Edison's early motion picture work. There were therefore many contributors to the swift development of motion pictures beyond the early work of Edison. By the late 1890s, a thriving new industry was firmly established, and by 1918 the industry had become so competitive that Edison got out of the movie business all together.

The success of the phonograph and motion pictures in the 1890s helped offset the greatest failure of Edison's career. Throughout the decade Edison worked in his laboratory and in the old iron mines of northwestern New Jersey to develop methods of mining iron ore to feed the insatiable demand of the Pennsylvania steel mills. To finance this work, Edison sold all his stock in General Electric. Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, Edison was never able to make the process commercially practical, and lost all the money he had invested. This would have meant financial ruin had not Edison continued to develop the phonograph and motion pictures at the same time. As it was, Edison entered the new century still financially secure and ready to take on another challenge.

Edison's new challenge was to develop a better storage battery for use in electric vehicles. Edison very much enjoyed automobiles and owned a number of different types during his life, powered by gasoline, electricity, and steam. Edison thought that electric propulsion was clearly the best method of powering cars, but realized that conventional lead-acid storage batteries were inadequate for the job. Edison began to develop an alkaline battery in 1899. It proved to be Edison's most difficult project, taking ten years to develop a practical alkaline battery. By the time Edison introduced his new alkaline battery, the gasoline powered car had so improved that electric vehicles were becoming increasingly less common, being used mainly as delivery vehicles in cities. However, the Edison alkaline battery proved useful for lighting railway cars and signals, maritime buoys, and miners lamps. Unlike iron ore mining, the heavy investment Edison made over ten years was repaid handsomely, and the storage battery eventually became Edison's most profitable product. Further, Edison's work paved the way for the modern alkaline battery.

By 1911, Thomas Edison had built a vast industrial operation in West Orange. Numerous factories had been built through the years around the original laboratory, and the staff of the entire complex had grown into the thousands. To better manage operations, Edison brought all the companies he had started to make his inventions together into one corporation, Thomas A. Edison Incorporated, with Edison as president and chairman. Edison was sixty-four by this time and his role with his company and in life began to change. Edison left more of the daily operations of both the laboratory and the factories to others. The laboratory itself did less original experimental work and instead worked more on refining existing Edison products such as the phonograph. Although Edison continued to file for and receive patents for new inventions, the days of developing new products that changed lives and created industries were behind him.

In the 1915, Edison was asked to head the Naval Consulting Board. With the United States inching closer towards the involvement in World War One, the Naval Consulting Board was an attempt to organize the talents of the leading scientists and inventors in the United States for the benefit of the American armed forces. Edison favored preparedness, and accepted the appointment. The Board did not make a notable contribution to the final allied victory, but did serve as a precedent for future successful cooperation between scientists, inventors and the United States military. During the war, at age seventy, Edison spent several months on Long Island Sound in a borrowed navy vessel experimenting on techniques for detecting submarines.

Edison's role in life began to change from inventor and industrialist to cultural icon, a symbol of American ingenuity, and a real life Horatio Alger story. In 1928, in recognition of a lifetime of achievement, the United States Congress voted Edison a special Medal of Honor. In 1929 the nation celebrated the golden jubilee of the incandescent light. The celebration culminated at a banquet honoring Edison given by Henry Ford at Greenfield Village, Ford's new American history museum, which included a complete restoration of the Menlo Park Laboratory. Attendees included President Herbert Hoover and many of the leading American scientists and inventors.

The last experimental work of Edison's life was done at the request of Edison's good friends Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone in the late 1920s. They asked Edison to find an alternative source of rubber for use in automobile tires. The natural rubber used for tires up to that time came from the rubber tree, which does not grow in the United States. Crude rubber had to be imported and was becoming increasingly expensive. With his customary energy and thoroughness, Edison tested thousands of different plants to find a suitable substitute, eventually finding a type of Goldenrod weed that could produce enough rubber to be feasible. Edison was still working on this at the time of his death.

During the last two years of his life Edison was in increasingly poor health. Edison spent more time away from the laboratory, working instead at Glenmont. Trips to the family vacation home in Fort Myers, Florida became longer. Edison was past eighty and suffering from a number of ailments. In August 1931 Edison collapsed at Glenmont. Essentially house bound from that point, Edison steadily declined until at 3:21 am on October 18, 1931 the great man died.

The Glenmont Estate is located in Llewellyn Park, a planned community begun in 1853 (platted in 1857) by Llewellyn Haskell. With assistance from Alexander Jackson Davis, landscape architects Eugene Baumann and Howard Daniels, and others, Haskell created a picturesque residential suburb that included curvilinear roads, native and exotic trees, and rustic architecture. Llewellyn Park Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is considered the country's first planned residential community and is significant for its landscape architecture, community planning and development, and architecture. Even though trees on the edges of the Glenmont property dated 1845 predate development of Llewellyn Park, they were purposely incorporated into its plan of keeping native trees which contribute toward the naturalistic and picturesque styles of landscape design.

The Glenmont grounds remained undeveloped until Henry Pedder purchased the property in 1879. New York architect Henry Hudson Holly designed Glenmont for Henry C. Pedder who spared no expense to furnish it in opulent Victorian style and hired the noted New York firm of Pottier and Stymus to decorate it. During construction of Glenmont, the first owner Henry Pedder made significant improvements to the surrounding landscape. From 1880 to 1882, Pedder commissioned Nathan Franklin Barrett to lay out the Glenmont grounds. With the exception of the mature vegetation along the periphery of the property, the Glenmont grounds were largely open in character in the 1880s.

Shortly after completion of the house, trees and shrubs were planted to enhance the beauty of the grounds, frame views, and screen service areas. Deciduous and evergreen trees (mostly maples, beeches, ash, oaks, Norway spruce, and white pine) were thoughtfully laid out along the paths and drives, while others were arranged in groups. Various evergreen and deciduous trees were planted around the service areas, intended to screen the less desirable views. Single specimen trees, primarily located in the south and west lawns, were placed near the house and admired for their beauty. Specimen trees found on the property included a Nordmann's fir, copper beech, weeping beech, weeping cherry, weeping spruce, paulownia, and Sargent weeping hemlock.

Thomas Edison purchased Glenmont in 1886. Mina Miller Edison, wife of Thomas Edison, assumed the lead role in the management and operation of the Glenmont grounds.

An overview of the Glenmont collections is available here , and the Laboratory complex here .

At the corner of Main Street and Lakeside Avenue in West Orange , New Jersey stands a group of red brick buildings. To the passing motorist the buildings betray little evidence of their glory days and of the people who worked inside. A short distance away is Glenmont, Thomas Edison's estate. Together, the laboratory and residence preserve the work and character of America's foremost inventor, Thomas Edison and the family , friends and business associates who played a key role in his success.

The museum collections at Thomas Edison National Historical Park are by far the largest single body of Edison-related material extant. They are the product of Thomas Alva Edison's sixty-year career as an inventor, manufacturer, businessman, and private citizen. The collections are divided into three broad categories: History artifacts, archives, and natural history and comprise holdings at both the Laboratory complex and the Glenmont Estate. The sheer size of the holdings is daunting: the history collection is currently estimated to number over 300,000 items, while the archives contain approximately five million documents. The Natural History Collection consists of plant specimens collected from the Glenmont Estate as part of a 1995 plant inventory. In total, it is the third largest museum collection in the National Park Service.