New Jersey – where we learnt about the origin of the light bulb, the record player, the tattoo machine and organised R&D.

Menlo Park

We took the train to New Jersey to see the original labs of the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Alva Edison. While the whole township around Menlo Park has been named after him, the museum where he had his laboratory is a very modest affair. It is basically a single room. It turns out that there are two Edison museums – one in Menlo Park and a larger one in Orange County where he built a later laboratory.

We had some difficulties getting directions to the museum. We walked to the local library and the guy there had to look it up on Google. This is also where we met a man who asked us if Australia was a democracy.  Of course, we weren’t sure ourselves and offered that we thought it was either a kakistocracy or a demagoguery.

The local cab driver knew of Menlo Park but said there was nothing to do there and that we were better off going to the nearby mall. “It’s not too late to go the mall you know. Your wife and kid would be happier there bud” he said conspiratorially to me as I paid the fare after we arrived at Menlo Park.

The Thomas Edison Center has a number of original artifacts from the original Menlo Park labs which are the oldest professional R&D labs in the world. Check out the plaque in the first picture below to see what was invented here. The woman who ran the place was very pleased to see us and we had a lively discussion about Edison and his rivals (such as Tesla).

The museum has just completed raising money to restore the giant incandescent light bulb that was erected in Edison’s honour back in 1938. Nothing like a big thing to drum up tourism.

Formally known as the Township of Nixon, not surprisingly it got changed to Edison

Check out this groovy gramophone attachment

If you are reading this with a tat, then you can thank (or curse) Thomas Edison for the invention of the electric engraving pen. Edison invented it in 1876 as a way to copy notes. The idea was that you wrote on a wax tablet with the electric engraving pen and then rolled ink over the tablet to silkscreen a copy. In 1891, an enterprising Brooklyn tattoo artist called Samuel O’Reilly attached a syringe filled with ink to it and created the modern tattooing machine. Prior to this invention, tattoos used to be painstakingly (with an emphasis on the “pain”) applied by dipping a needle in ink and then inserting it into the skin. O’Reilly waited until Edison’s patent on the engraving pen expired and then, with his syringe adaptation, successfully filed his own patent for the world’s first Electronic Tattooing Machine.

Edison’s alkaline battery from the 1890s

Edison also tried to pioneer the first electric cars running off his batteries

If you are reading this on a portable device, then you can thank (or curse) Waldemar Jungner and Thomas Edison for the invention of the DC alkaline battery whose modern lithium descendants power all manner of tech devices. Volta invented the first primitive battery back in 1791, but the modern battery was first invented in 1899 by Jungner as the first nickel cadmium battery. During the same period Edison was also working on an alkaline battery along similar lines but was beaten to the punch by Jungner. The big difference was that Jungner’s battery was rechargeable while Edison’s was not. However, being the canny businessman that he was, Edison beat Jugner with the first patents and cleaned up.