Thursday Oct 11, 2018

Map and road video – Pompton Plains, NJ to Washington Beltway

The final day of my Canadian Atlantic Tour was much like the first, very wet for much of the time as I drove home from New Jersey. The bright spot, however, was a visit to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, NJ. The site was the location of Edison’s largest lab complex from 1887 until he died in 1931 and, due to Edison’s careful documentation and the large number of photographs taken, the Park Service has been able to return the 200,000 artifacts to where they were when the lab was active.

Edison is well known for inventing the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph but he also invented the rechargeable battery, the first moving picture camera, hand held viewer and projector as well as creating the first motion picture studio, he founded a company for electricity generation that eventually became General Electric and developed medical X-ray equipment among many other achievements. He employed over 100 scientists, engineers and craftsmen and collected a huge library of reference materials and journals to guide his research teams.

I got chatting with Arthur, one of several volunteers who answer questions and demonstrate aspects of Edison’s work for visitors, and he was gracious enough to give me a personal demonstration of the phonograph and gramophone in Edison’s music room. The volume and quality from the original cylinder and disk on equipment that dated from 1914 was amazing.

This is a view of about half of one floor of the main lab. There were three floors in this building plus three other buildings containing chemistry, physics and metallurgy labs.
Although the labs were purely functional the same building had an upscale showplace that he used when he wanted to impress people such as  potential investors, other inventors and journalists.
The phonograph and gramophone on the left of this picture were in perfect working order and demonstrated to me by Arthur.
The phonograph and rechargeable batteries were Edison’s greatest commercial successes. He invented nickel iron (NiFe) rechargeable batteries and I dated myself to Arthur when I told him that they were the sources of electricity we used in physics classes when I was in high school. Ours did look somewhat more modern than this.