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NARRATOR— He left home in his mid-teens to become a telegraph operator. He filed his first patent at age 21, for an electric vote recorder. But he found no market for it.
He had his first success with an improved stock ticker in 1870. He also built his first laboratory, in Newark, New Jersey. There he married Mary Stilwell. In 1876 they moved to Menlo Park, where Edison built a new lab. Mary Edison died unexpectedly in 1884. Two years later, Edison married Mina[4] Miller. Here’s the first Edison laboratory curator, Norman Spieden, in 1977.
NORMAN SPIEDEN—When he first met the second Mrs. Edison, he taught her telegraphy right away. And when he proposed to her, he tapped it out on her knee while there were a lot of people in the front seat of the car. She told me that herself. And she tapped out “Yes” in answer.[5]
NARRATOR— To hear why Edison built the West Orange lab, press the green PLAY button now.
NARRATOR—Professor Bernard Carlson of the University of Virginia.
BERNIE CARLSON—In the mid-1880s, Thomas Edison was America’s leading inventor. And over the previous 15 years, he had developed major improvements in telegraphy, in the telephone, and he had invented his phonograph. Of course, his most important success, prior to coming to West Orange, was the development of the incandescent lighting system which he worked on from 1878 to 1882. … Designing the laboratory at West Orange gave him an important competitive advantage over rival inventors. As he planned it, the space would a) be flexible so that he could work on many different projects at the same time and increase the number of rooms or pieces of equipment that he could devote to a particular project. It also gave him an advantage because at West Orange, he had all of the supplies and tools and personnel that he needed to move on a project very quickly and bring a new product to market ahead of his competitors.
NARRATOR— When you’re ready to begin the main tour, go through the exit door. Then press [2].
[1] Will Oakland and Chorus, “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen,” The Edison CD Sampler, copyright 1984 Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, NJ, track 11 (use chorale near end)
NARRATOR—Read the notice on the time clock. “Cigarette smoking in the laboratory must be stopped. Anyone disobeying this order will be dismissed.” Edison realized the health hazards of cigarettes as early as 1915. But what concerned him most were toxins released by burning cigarette paper—not tobacco itself. Edison continued to smoke cigars and chew tobacco.
A sign beside the time clock gives Edison’s favorite quotation, by the English painter and scholar Sir Joshua Reynolds. “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
Businessmen, politicians, and celebrities sometimes waited here in the entrance hall before meeting Edison in the library. They could pass the time looking at items like the framed flag across the hall from the clock. The National Ediphone Distributors gave this flag to Mr. Edison in 1920. It marked the 43rd anniversary of the invention of the Ediphone: a redesigned phonograph used as an office dictation system. You’ll also see pictures of the Edison Portland Cement Company plant at New Village, near Stewartsville, New Jersey, a Watchman’s clock to monitor the guards’ nightly patrols, and an old ornately carved fire alarm panel.
NARRATOR—Notice the film projector nearby. It proudly displays Thomas Edison’s signature as a brand name. Once again, Professor Bernie Carlson.
BERNIE CARLSON—Edison, in many ways, was the first branded personality. When Thomas A. Edison, Incorporated, is created in 1910, the head of it, Frank Dyer, who was a lawyer, makes the decision that he’s going to do several things simultaneously. First and foremost, he issues an official, two-volume biography of the great inventor, which he helps to co-author. He also goes on and in true lawyerly fashion, secures a copyright for Thomas Edison’s signature, which then appears on all of the products that come out of T.A.E., Inc. And they all have the signature Thomas A. Edison on it in its distinctive way. And he also gets copyright control over Edison’s picture. And Edison’s picture appears on countless products. Most prominently, the phonograph cylinders that people collect today.
NARRATOR— By the time Edison died in 1931, he was arguably the most famous man on earth. Look for his brand name on Edison products you see throughout this tour.
NARRATOR— Thomas Edison managed his corporation while suffering from a profound hearing loss. The video monitor shows film clips of Edison employees speaking to the Old Man. Most of them lean in, as he cups his ear. Here’s Norman Spieden,[1] the first Edison laboratory curator, recorded in 1977.
NORMAN SPIEDEN— He used to say that when you were deaf, you got the truth more often. … Edison had this big library. And anybody who had disobeyed orders or done something foolish would be called in to Mr. Edison’s desk to account for what they had done. They had to shout into Mr. Edison’s ear so he could hear it. And they couldn’t tell a lie when there were six people standing, working in the library who would know that it was a lie![2]
NARRATOR— By the early 1920s, employment applicants for Edison had to take a written test of general and technical knowledge. The Boss himself wrote the questions, which covered geography, astronomy, economics, literature, history, and other topics. Try to answer these three questions from Edison’s test. One: who was the most celebrated maker of violins? Two: how many miles are there between the earth and the sun? Three: where is Tierra del Fuego?
NARRATOR— The most celebrated violin-maker was Stradivarius. The distance between the earth and sun is 93 million miles. And Tierra del Fuego is in Argentina.
Edison knew the answers to all of his questions, though he’d never been to college. He expected any educated American to know them too. Yet his son, Theodore, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, failed the test. When the New York Times published Edison’s list of questions, Albert Einstein reportedly flunked as well.
NARRATOR—Thomas Alva Edison died October 18th, 1931. One of his employees, Paul Kasakove, was a member of the Old Man’s funeral honor guard. Here’s Kasakove in 1970, telling a story about the large clock over the fireplace.
PAUL KASAKOVE— The hands of that clock, you’ll notice, are stopped at about 26 minutes after three. That happens to be just about the time that Mr. Thomas A. Edison died at his home in Glenmont. … Charlie Edison, his oldest son, who later, you know, was governor of our state here, Charles realized that there’d be thousands of people wanting to see his father at the funeral. … He thought it’d be a nice thing to have him laid out here in the library, where he spent so much of his life and where people would get to see him. So he came here, he came down here the very same morning that his father died to look around for a place. … Now when Charles stood here looking around, he happened to look up at that clock to see what time it was. And there were the hands of the clock stopped, just like they are now. And of course he knew that was the time his father died that morning. He went around asking everybody, “Who stopped the clock? Who stopped the clock?” But, you know, he was never able to find anybody who would admit stopping the clock. So we have a great big mystery, about “the clock that stopped when the old man died, and never did it go again.”[1]
[1] Paul Kasakove 4/23/1970, excerpt from transfer no. 395-03
NARRATOR—These toolboxes and lunch pails resemble the personal belongings that machinists brought to work in the West Orange lab.
BERNIE CARLSON—Over the years, Edison had anywhere from a dozen to several dozen workers in the Heavy Machine Shop at West Orange. He hired all sorts of people, but in particular, he liked to hire immigrants from Germany and the Scandinavian countries. He didn’t pay his workers very well, and he often had a high rate of turnover in the Machine Shop, with people coming and going on a regular basis.
NARRATOR—But certain trusted machinists became part of Edison’s inner circle, and stayed for years. Like the Swiss immigrant John Kruesi, who built the first phonograph from Edison’s rough sketch.
BERNIE CARLSON—In addition to the skilled workers that he had in the Machine Shop, he also had a large number of unskilled workers, and boys. “Boys,” at West Orange, when they were on the payroll, meant any young man in his teen years. The boys that worked at West Orange carried out a variety of tasks; they did small assignments in the Machine Shop, they ran messages, and in general, they learned the trade of how-to-invent at West Orange.
(ENG) Scientific and Craft Knowledge (306)
English audio guide for Scientific and Craft Knowledge, #306
NARRATOR— Inside this fenced-in area, workmen repaired broken tools and machinery. Thomas Edison designed the West Orange complex to be completely self-sufficient. It had its own repair facilities, its own sources of power and water, and enough space, supplies, and equipment to pursue many investigations simultaneously.
As an employer, Edison valued practical, hands-on experience over formal education.
BERNIE CARLSON— Edison certainly hired his share of scientists. And those included Arthur Kennelly, who went on to become a famous scientist and professor at MIT; Reginald Fessenden, who was also an inventor in his own right who worked on the first applications of radio for broadcasting speech; and countless other very talented chemists and physicists. But the key people for Edison were craftsmen, skilled workers. … People with a great deal of knowledge of how to work with their hands, how to shape materials, and how to spot opportunities. These were the men who became the muckers.
NARRATOR— The video display nearby shows clips from the first experimental films at the West Orange lab. One brief clip from 1891 features an athlete juggling Indian clubs. He’s standing more or less where you are now. Edison’s mucker William Dickson, and his assistant, Charles Brown, worked here, in one of the partitioned laboratory rooms that ran along this side of the machine shop. Their job was to develop an invention that Edison named the “kinetoscope.”
BERNIE CARLSON— The kinetoscope began with an extraordinary idea in Edison’s mind. Why not make a machine that did for the eye what the phonograph did for the ear? … Edison thought that it would be most profitable if he made a machine that could be only used by one viewer at a time. What he called a “nickel in the slot” machine. Once he had the idea for the kinetoscope, Edison then picked one of his muckers, William K.L. Dickson, to run the project.
BERNIE CARLSON—Dickson decided that what he wanted to do was to take advantage of a series of stop-action slides, and to project those so that people could look at them as a group. Dickson went on to build a machine along these lines, and he showed it to Edison. And in its first film, it showed Dickson approaching the camera, raising his hat, and saying hello to Edison. … Edison took one look at this machine that Dickson had produced, and he rejected it. Basically, Edison rejected it because he didn’t want a projector. What he wanted was some sort of peep-show machine that people could look at, and view one person at a time. … These peep-show machines were a big success in penny arcades, and in particular, at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. The kinetoscope episode, then, illustrates how for Edison, invention meant not only getting the device right, but also keeping focused on a viable market strategy.
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