Thomas Edison was forty when he opened his West Orange laboratory in 1887. His earliest ventures at West Orange included an improved or "perfected" phonograph, and an "instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear," the motion picture camera and projector.

The concept of team-based research, begun at his Menlo Park labs, continued at West Orange, but on a grander scale. At West Orange Edison employed as many as two hundred chemists, machinists, engineers, and experimenters, all working at Edison's direction and all devoted to the "rapid and cheap development of an invention."

West Orange was more than a mere research facility. A giant factory complex turned inventive ideas into mass-produced reality. Profits from one product financed the research and development of another. "I always invented to obtain money to go on inventing," was Edison's description of this process.

At their peak in 1919-1920 the factories surrounding the red-brick laboratory buildings employed ten thousand people, making an array of Edison products marketed around the world. These products represented the fruits of Edison's patents. Of the 1,093 U.S. patents granted to Edison, more than half came from his work in West Orange.