Thomas Edison was not just an inventor but a businessman who ran an industrial empire. Around his laboratory, he built large factories where thousands of employees mass-produced his inventions for the public. He understood the importance of capital, saying, “I always invented to obtain money to go on inventing.” A six-story concrete structure completed in 1914 to produce storage batteries is the last surviving Edison factory building, after the others were demolished in the 1960s and 1970s. At its peak in 1918-19, Thomas A. Edison, Inc. employed about 10,000 workers in West Orange.
