In 1875, Thomas Edison left his small Newark, New Jersey, shop and laboratory for Menlo Park, a failed housing development on the Pennsylvania Rail line in Raritan Township, where he bought two tracts of land and established a larger home and laboratory complex. He moved there with his wife Mary and their children in March 1876, while his father, Samuel Edison, oversaw construction of the main laboratory building, where Edison’s early staff included two experimenters and three machinists from Newark. Backed first by William Orton and Western Union in exchange for inventions in telegraph and telephone technology, the laboratory was equipped for scientific research, with offices, a library, model rooms, a machine shop, and an upper-floor laboratory filled with chemicals, instruments, microscopes, spectroscopes, and galvanic batteries. After the phonograph’s success in 1878 led to the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, and the Edison Electric Light Co. was founded later that year, Edison expanded his staff and facilities with additional machinists, experimenters, office workers, chemists, a steam engineer, a lamp blower, physicist Francis Upton, a brick machine shop, a brick office and library, a boarding house, and other specialized buildings. By 1880, the greatly expanded Menlo Park complex gave Edison the manpower, workspace, and equipment to develop and test prototypes quickly and pursue multiple technologies at once, helping him create not only a successful incandescent lamp but also the electrical system that made it commercially successful. Menlo Park became known as the world’s first organized research laboratory and helped shape the modern industrial laboratory.
