When Thomas Edison was 7, his teacher called him "addled" and kicked him out of school. So his mother homeschooled him. Today he might be labeled ADHD or autistic. And he became America's most famous inventor.
We spent a day at his West Orange lab complex, where Edison perfected his phonograph and developed a rechargeable battery, among his 1,093 patents.
Photo op with Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison.The West Orange lab closed after Edison died in 1931, but reopened as a museum in 1948.At one point, a part of this room was portioned off for Edison's secret experiments.The heavy machine shop was used for making and repairing machine parts.Kids can earn a Junior Rangers badge and patch!This three-story building holds a library, machine shops and rooms for experiments.The National Park Service had to go through and remove some of the more dangerous ingredients like mercury and some explosives, but otherwise the chemistry laboratory is pretty much the way Edison left it.Edison standardized color-coding the pipes in his chemistry lab.The drafting room, where rough sketches were turned into measured drawings.Thomas and Mina Edison's Glenmont Estate is located in the first gated community in the U.S., Llewellyn Park, founded in 1857. You have to get a special pass to get past the guard. It's 12 miles outside Manhattan, but it feels like a secluded forest dotted with bajillion dollar mansions. The Edisons are buried in the back yard.Edison worked on his inventions into his 80s. His final project was finding a domestic source of rubber. He hybridized goldenrod and grew 14-foot specimens. It would have been ok in a pinch, but ultimately synthetic rubber came along so the goldenrod rubber didn't catch on.It looks like brains in the jar, but it's crude rubber made from goldenrod.The tools in the precision machine shop were used to build prototypes for smaller inventions, like the phonograph and rechargeable battery.The first time someone recorded sound and played it back was on this phonograph.When you're the boss, you can sleep on the job. Edison took naps on this cot in the library.Edison had a photography studio! Lots of documentation of his work.
