The Wizard's roots, better than ever: the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park

With multiple stories already written on Thomas Edison and features on his lab and home in West Orange, it's remarkable that we haven't yet made a proper visit to the town that proudly bears his name. Specifically, I'm talking about the site where he built his first invention factory, the community that led to his famed sobriquet: the Wizard of Menlo Park.

The Thomas Edison Center, also known as the Menlo Park Museum, sits modestly on a side street off Route 27, honoring a man whose inventions changed the world. Long-time readers might recall that we've gone there a few times before, notably to find the site of the first electric railroad and get lost in the adjacent woods and trail in what's officially Thomas Edison State Park. The two most notable historic aspects of the park, the museum and the memorial tower, were closed for renovation during those earlier visits.

The great news is that while the tower is still mired in the restoration process, the small museum is open again, and better than ever. Housed in what was originally built to be the tower's visitors center, the pre-renovation museum was cramped with enough artifacts to qualify it for the world record for most history per square foot. While it gave a good representation of his work at Menlo Park, there were so many display cases that it was difficult for a tour of more than a handful of people at one time to visit comfortably.

Now, visitors are welcomed with an overview of Edison's work, not just in Menlo Park, but throughout his career. A timeline in the entry area indicates the start of his career as an itinerant telegraph operator and follows him to the East Coast, to Newark, Menlo Park, New York and West Orange. Additional panels illustrate the brief history of Menlo Park as a failed residential development that Edison saw as an ideal setting to build his invention factory. And a corridor into the main display area is lined with copies of a small selection of the 400 patents he was granted for new technologies developed on site.

While half of his 1093 patents were derived from work done at the West Orange labs, Edison is best remembered for two Menlo Park inventions: the phonograph and the perfected incandescent light bulb. The newly-curated exhibit gives ample attention to both but also highlights other lesser-known yet still very recognizable innovations. A rusted rail and spike represent the electric railroad he built on the property, while a motorized pen, printers' roller and tube of mimeograph ink introduce the electric duplicating system he invented in Newark and patented in Menlo Park. Another part of the room includes the carbon button microphone Edison developed in 1877 as an improvement to the telephone Alexander Graham Bell had patented a year earlier. Various equipment represent the machine shop where workers made parts that would be assembled into inventions.

The best part of a visit to Menlo Park hasn't changed much: the storytelling ability of the Thomas Edison Center's volunteer museum guides. A visitor could definitely learn a lot just by studying the interpretive text around the exhibit, but the volunteers give life to Edison's persistence and belief in the process of invention.

Once you've heard the stories and seen the artifacts, you're hungry to explore the places where Edison walked, thought and toiled. Regrettably, very little remains to represent his physical presence on the site, as the lab and other structures were taken down in 1929 and reconstructed at Henry Ford's Greenfield Village in Michigan. If you go to the edge of the Menlo Park property and look carefully atop the rise at the corner of Christie Street and Tower Road, you'll find the sunken foundation of the building that housed the inventor's office, plus another, smaller building. A gnarled, barely-recognizable portion of the doorstep remains, giving visitors the chance to step, literally, where Edison did.

The 129-foot high Memorial Tower stands over the actual site where Edison lit the first long-lasting (14 hours) incandescent bulb. A gift from early associates who dubbed themselves the Edison Pioneers, it was constructed of 13 different mosaic mixes of Edison Portland cement, from dark at the base to light at the top, and topped with a 13 foot, 8 inch high Pyrex light bulb. The ongoing restoration includes repair work on the exterior cement and the installation of 21st century lighting and sound systems that Edison surely would have approved of. It's expected to open sometime this summer.

The Thomas Edison Center is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, making it the perfect starting point for an Edison exploration day. It's close enough to the Parkway that you could easily spend an hour or two there and then zip up to Thomas Edison National Historical Park to learn more about his later years.

Menlo Park Ink? Edison's hidden link to body art.

What does Thomas Edison have in common with L.A. Ink's Kat Von D, a gazillion bikers and legions of hipster Brooklynites?

If you guessed they all have tattoos, you'd be close. Edison most likely didn't sport ink (I could be wrong), but he invented the electric pen, which was later adapted into the precursor of the instrument used to apply permanent skin artwork today.

Born in Edison's Newark lab in 1876 and patented after his move to Menlo Park, the electric pen was conceived with business uses in mind. His invention was actually a stencil maker, a battery-operated pen whose tip had a stylus that rapidly perforated the paper as the user wrote. The finished document would then be run through a press that forced ink through the perforations onto another piece of paper, printing an exact duplicate of the original document.

Edison believed that document-dependent businesses like banks, law firms and insurance companies would be quick to grasp the time- and labor-saving benefits of his invention, and many did, despite the challenges presented by the device's sometimes temperamental battery arrangement. Not surprisingly, enthusiasm was a bit more muted from clerks whose work was being severely curtailed as a result of the machine's prodigious output. The business soon expanded worldwide.

Other manufacturers soon devised ways around the battery issues, and Edison lost his dominant share in the electric pen market. He sold the patent to Western Electric, then reacquired it and sold it to A.B. Dick, who reverently proclaimed Edison the "father of mimeography." Eventually the whole industry declined with the increasing use of typewriters, though A.B. Dick profitably adapted the printing concept into the mimeograph press many of us recall from the 60's and 70's. (Remember those blue 'ditto' sheets and the chemical smell when they were fresh off the press?)

What does this have to do with tattoos? In 1891 a New York tattoo artist named Samuel O'Reilly realized that with the addition of tubing and an ink reservoir, Edison's pen could quickly and efficiently deposit ink into the skin, saving both time for the artist and probably a lot of pain for the recipient. Other artists later experimented with electromagnetic motors, reducing the pen's weight and allowing for greater dexterity.

Regardless, Edison had inadvertently spurred innovation in a field in which he likely had absolutely no interest. I do wonder, though: if he had gotten a tattoo, what would it be of?

Iron Mike and the CCC

Ever have one of those weekends where you run into the same person in two different places, even though you didn't share your agenda with him, or, for that matter, even have plans set beforehand?

Memorial Day weekend was that way for us. Granted, it was three days instead of two, but still, it was kind of wild, especially considering the guy we ran into was Iron Mike.

We first met Mike on the grounds of the Montclair State School of Conservation, deep within Stokes State Forest. As you'll see, he really lives up to his nickname.

Mike in Stokes State Forest

Considering how firmly planted he seemed to be in Sussex County, we were surprised to run into him two days later at Roosevelt Park in Edison.

Mike in Edison

Both statues were accompanied by a plaque marking the statue as a representative of the thousands of Americans who participated in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression. From 1933 to 1942, the CCC employed young urban men to plant millions of trees to restore the nation's depleted forests and prevent soil erosion. Besides providing good jobs to reduce the unemployment rate, the program enabled participants to help support their families, many of whom were living in poverty. Eventually, every state in the nation hosted at least one CCC camp, and the Corps' work extended to other wilderness activities like building roads, stocking rivers and lakes, and creating drainage systems to preserve valuable farmland. Many of their projects, including a litany of county, state and national parks, continue to make a positive impact to this day.

As I discovered through a little research, Iron Mike is the product of the effort of CCC alumni to increase awareness of the Corps and its impact. They're aiming to place at least one Mike in every state, and remarkably, Ivan and I found both New Jersey Mikes without knowing anything about the statue project. Stokes Mike has been there since 1996, while Edison Mike has gazed over Route 1 since 2003.

Not to quibble, but I found slight differences between the two iterations, explained perhaps by the seven year gap between their respective births. The Edison Mike is, shall we say, a bit more sinewy than his Stokes brother. Maybe they're cast from different molds, or perhaps the Middlesex County incarnation spent a little more time at the gym, but the variations make for a fun little game of observation. Go check them out and let me know what you think.