Thomas Edison

Edison worked on plenty of military technology during WWI. But one Edison machine went to war for a very different reason: to play records.

WW I had pulled Thomas Edison in an unusual direction. As chairman of the Naval Consulting Board, he was spending much of his time conducting research for the U.S. military, particularly on problems facing the Navy.

Back in West Orange, that meant a change for the Edison companies. In June 1916, his son Charles Edison took over management, while his father became increasingly occupied with wartime research and his chemical operations.

Then, in 1917, the U.S. Army Depot Quartermaster in New York requested phonographs for American troops. The Edison Company responded with the Army and Navy Model, a version of the phonograph made specifically to travel.

Instead of an elaborate cabinet designed for an American living room, the machine was protected inside a sturdy wooden crate reinforced with angle iron and finished in military enamel. Its 280 individual pieces were numbered and labeled so it could be dismantled and put back together.

It sold for $60.

The War Department ultimately never purchased the machines, but individual military units did, and some carried them overseas.

It’s an overlooked chapter in Edison's WWI story. While Thomas Edison was working on technology for the U.S. military, the company now being managed by his son was adapting one of his most famous inventions for life among the troops.

A phonograph couldn't shorten the distance between France and home.

But for the length of a record, it could make that distance sound a little smaller. 🎶

In October 1870, 23-year-old Thomas Edison made himself a promise.

At the end of a pocket notebook, he wrote: “All new inventions I will here after keep a full record.”

Notebooks did indeed become part of the iconic way Edison worked. Early on, his ideas and experiments could be found in pocket notebooks, ledgers and on loose scraps of paper.

But as Edison's ambitions grew, his record keeping grew with them. Loose pages gave way to standardized hardbound laboratory notebooks. The occasional doodle still found its way into the margins.

This note-taking became part of the system behind the world's first industrial R&D laboratory, where Edison and his team could capture ideas, experiments and improvements as they happened.

The search for practical electric light alone produced an enormous paper trail. Ideas were tested, recorded, changed and tested again. It was STEM before we called it STEM, and it helped create the modern process of turning an idea into something the world could actually use.

Today, Thomas Edison National Historical Park preserves more than 3,000 of these notebooks, part of an archive of approximately 5 million pages documenting Edison's life and work.

And if you visit the lab today, you'll find a reminder of that habit before you even walk through the library doors.

Look closely at the statue of Edison in the courtyard. There's a notebook in his hand.

So many years later, those pages still let us look over his shoulder at the work behind the inventions that helped create modern life.

Or, as Edison put it:

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

The inventions made history. The notebooks show us the perspiration.

There’s work to be done. Happy Monday. 💡

When Edison started working on motion pictures, there were no movie theaters. No Hollywood. Not even a blueprint for what a movie should be. 🎥

There was just an idea: Could you capture motion and play it back?

After seeing a scientific presentation in the late 1880s, Edison and his laboratory team began developing the technology to do it for entertainment, not just to study animals. The work eventually produced the Kinetograph, an early motion-picture camera, and the Kinetoscope, which allowed people to watch short moving pictures.

But inventing the technology opened up a whole new set of questions.

What should people watch? How do you film it? Where do you film it? How do you get enough light?

The answer to several of those questions was a strange black building in West Orange that became known as the Black Maria.

Built in 1892-93, the Black Maria was the world’s first motion picture studio, created specifically to produce films for this new medium. Inside, Edison’s team filmed dancers, wrestlers, jugglers and other performers.

The studio was an invention in its own right. Early filmmaking relied heavily on sunlight, so the roughly 25-by-30-foot Black Maria sat on a center pivot that allowed the entire building to rotate toward the sun. Part of its roof opened to bring daylight onto the stage.

And this was just the beginning. Motion pictures moved quickly from experimental technology to a new form of mass entertainment, with larger audiences, new studios and increasingly ambitious films.

Before Hollywood, before the movie theater as we know it, there was the Black Maria.

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the first light bulb. So why does he get the credit?

It’s one of the biggest misconceptions about Edison, and the real story actually tells us a lot more about how he helped build the modern world.

Inventors had been experimenting with electric light for decades before Edison began his work at Menlo Park. Some had even created working incandescent lamps.

The problem? They weren’t practical for everyday life. Early bulbs could be expensive, unreliable, require too much electricity, or burn out too quickly.

Edison saw a promising idea and asked a different question: How do we make this actually work for everyone?

Over roughly 18 months, Edison and his team conducted around 1,200 experiments and tested thousands of materials in search of a filament that could burn longer and work efficiently.

By October 1879, they had demonstrated a carbon-filament lamp that burned for more than 13 hours. Continued experimentation soon pushed lamp life much further.

But Edison wasn’t just building a better bulb. He was thinking bigger.

His team developed the generators, wiring, switches, sockets, meters, fuses, and distribution infrastructure needed to create an entire electrical system. In 1882, Edison’s Pearl Street Station began supplying electric power to customers in lower Manhattan.

That distinction is important to understanding Edison.

He didn’t just invent. He innovated. He took emerging technologies, improved them, built systems around them, and figured out how to move them out of the laboratory and into everyday life, into homes and businesses.

So no, Edison did not create the first-ever electric light.

He helped make electric light practical, scalable, and part of the world we know today 💡⚡

Fun fact: Edison’s mother, Nancy, was a former teacher who helped shape his love of reading, experimenting, and asking questions as his homeschool teacher.📚

That curiosity stayed with him throughout his life and helped set the stage for his success.

As students everywhere begin a new year of learning, a few ideas from Edison on education that are still worth carrying with us:

💡 Learn by doing. Not everything worth knowing is found in a book.

💡 Build good habits early. They have a way of shaping where you go.

💡 Read beyond what you already know and love. Curiosity grows when you explore something new.

💡 Let mistakes teach you something. Then try again.

💡 Keep learning, long after the school day ends!

Which one would you pass along to a student starting a new year? 📚

Happy Labor Day!

Before glamping had a name, Thomas Edison was already doing it.

On August 28, 1916, just three days after President Woodrow Wilson signed the act establishing the National Park Service, Edison left for a two-week camping trip through the Catskills and Adirondacks with Harvey Firestone and naturalist John Burroughs.

But this was not exactly a bare-bones adventure.

They brought tents, staff and a fully stocked kitchen. When they wanted hot baths and clean sheets, they checked into hotels.

The trip helped launch the famous “Vagabond” camping tradition. As factories expanded and automobiles made the outdoors more accessible, these highly publicized adventures encouraged Americans to hit the open road and experience nature for themselves.

Edison may have left the laboratory behind, but he never stopped looking for inspiration.

Sometimes, the best ideas need a little fresh air.

Failure is part of the process💡 Keep going!