The Invention Factory

Edison set up his new complex in rural Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876. Menlo Park was a town on the main rail line between New York City and Philadelphia. He chose the location because the land was cheap and there was easy access to the resources of the cities (especially the rich investors Edison needed to support his work), but it didnt have the distractions of the big city.He had a large staff of specialists, ranging from machinists to physicists, who helped turn his ideas into realities. He created what he nicknamed The Invention Factory, a complex of a laboratory, machine shop, office, and a library. In short, he put everything he needed for inventing in one place.

The Menlo Park gang produced an incredible variety of inventions and improvements to existing inventions. They include the followingThe phonograph An improved telephone transmitter The electric pen (a machine that created a stencil that was could be used to make multiple copies of a document)The electric light bulbEdison worked long hours in his laboratory, quite unaware of the time. He would say, I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. He would work for 16 hours at a stretch, gaining a reputation for not sleeping Actually, he took cat naps whenever he needed them and wherever he was located, sometimes snoozing in the middle of the day stretched out on the ground under a bush, on his workbench or on his cot located in the back of his laboratory.The Menlo Park Laboratory was equipped with 2,500 bottles of chemicals lining the wall and a pipe organ at the back, which was the focal point for after hours singing and beer drinking. Many times the various scientists and technicians would stay up all night inventing, working and munching on ham, crackers, beer, soda, and cheese. About midnight, Edison himself would sit down at the pipe organ and everyone would join in for a sing along. Many years later his employees would say that these were the happiest years of their lives.