Since his trip to London in the spring of 1873, where he had come face to face with his scientific shortcomings, Edison had dreamed of opening a laboratory where he could indulge his passion for research. In late December 1875, just two weeks after he settled his bitter patent dispute with Western Union, Edison purchased two tracts of land and a house in what had been part of a failed real-estate development in Menlo Park, New Jersey, a rural village twelve miles south of Newark. There he built what would become his most famous lab and machine shop. Menlo Park was the prototype of Edison’s industrial research center, the launching pad for most of the inventions for which he is best known.

When he moved to Menlo Park in the spring of 1876, Edison left behind his manufacturing interests in Newark and created what he called an “invention business.” The laboratory, the largest in the country, was a sprawling, two-story, wooden structure with a pitched roof that resembled a farmhouse. On the ground floor, Edison built a small office, library, and drafting room. The second floor was a long, open space, filled with tables piled high with instruments, machines, and batteries. Along the walls were shelves stocked with containers holding chemicals and materials. Here Edison spent most of his time, intently engaged in a task, surrounded by a small group of skilled workers.

Journalists began making pilgrimages to this “scientific factory” to see the inventor in action. One reporter described Edison this way: “There is a general appearance of youth about his face, but it is knit into anxious wrinkles, and seems old. The hair, beginning to be touched with grey, falls over his face in a mop. The hands are stained with acid, his clothing is ‘ready-made.’ He has the air of a mechanic, or more definitely, with his peculiar pallor, of a night printer . . . When he looks up his attention comes back slowly as if it had been a long way off. But it comes back fully and cordially. A cheerful smile chases away the grave and somewhat weary look. He seems . . . almost a big, careless schoolboy.”

Edison’s workday at Menlo Park usually began at 7:00 a.m. in the machine shop, where he would examine the results of the work done overnight and leave new instructions for his workers. Next, he would focus on the experiments in his lab, breaking for lunch with his employees to discuss business or the progress of his inventions. Afterward, he would head back to the lab bench to continue his labors, often through the night. When a son who came to work for him once complained around 1:00 a.m. that he was getting sleepy, his father replied, “If you’ve got to sleep, go lie down under the table in the corner” - something Edison had done many times himself.

The process of creating his hundreds of inventions, Edison said, began with “an intuition. . . . Then difficulties arise. . . . ‘Bugs’ - as such little faults and difficulties are called - show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.”

That was Edison’s essential formula. Above his desk at Menlo Park, he hung a famous saying by the English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds: “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” But he understood early that ideas and ambition were not enough if he wanted to profit from his inventions. The work ethic instilled in him by his parents and confirmed by experience was the foundation of his career. As he famously stated in Harper’s magazine in 1932, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Edison spent countless hours in the laboratory, slaving over his inventions. One of his first employees, a man named Johnson, gave biographer J.B. McClure a vivid description of the inventor as he attempted to make his printing telegraph go faster. Edison was stymied not by the mechanical limits of his machine but by the quality of the paper he was using; he couldn’t get the ink to stick. The solution, Edison realized, would be to coat the paper with a chemical that would make the ink adhere.

“I came in one night,” Johnson recalled, “and there sat Edison with a pile of chemistries and chemical books that were five feet high when they stood on the floor and laid one upon the other. He had ordered them from New York, London, and Paris. He studied them night and day. He ate at his desk and slept in his chair. In six weeks he had gone through the books, written a volume of extracts, made 2,000 experiments on the formulas and produced a solution - the only one in the world - that would do the very thing he wanted done.”

Critics remarked that Edison could have saved himself a lot of time and trouble by paying more attention to theories and eliminating experiments that wouldn’t work. Edison shrugged off the idea. “If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed,” he once said. “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”

From the beginning, Thomas Edison was a different kind of boss. He was happiest kneeling on the floor beside his men, examining a piece of machinery. He considered his workmen his peers - not hired hands. They, in turn, were fiercely loyal. When Edison was still in his early twenties, they began calling him “the old man” - an obvious expression of their admiration and respect.

The work conducted in Edison’s lab required precision and a delicate touch; only the most skilled personnel could do the job. Transforming an Edison sketch into a piece of functioning machinery could be a daunting task. The craftsmen Edison hired were mainly trained clock workers and machinists, often immigrants from Europe.

Many of Edison’s early hires became part of his inner circle, assisting him with his experiments and helping run his machine shop teams. Some would stay with him for twenty years or more - men like Charles Batchelor, an English machinist trained in the textile industry of Manchester, and John Kruesi, a Swiss watchmaker. Another member of the original Newark team was Sigmund Bergmann, a German electrician who later became the co-founder of Siemens, one of Germany’s foremost manufacturers of electrical products. These and a handful of other men formed the core of Edison’s myriad future enterprises.

What Edison created was not the stereotypical factory of the Industrial Revolution, with workers performing repetitive actions designed to lower costs and raise efficiency - it was a bustling hub of creativity and shared intent. Edison hired proud and skillful craftspeople and opened up his lab to them. In return, he expected them to dedicate themselves to the projects to which they were assigned. Anyone who did not would soon leave, usually of his own volition.

The atmosphere in the Edison machine shop was open and congenial. When a new employee asked about rules, Edison told him, “Hell, there ain’t no rules here! We’re trying to accomplish something.” The men were given freedom to experiment on their own, testing new ideas, materials, and work methods.

This is not to say that Edison was a pushover or that he spoiled his staff. He was a tough and demanding employer. Once, in the early Newark days, when a defect was discovered in a batch of new machines, Edison called his men together and announced, “I’ve locked the door, and you’ll have to stay here until this job is completed. Well, let’s find the bugs.”

Edison was never formal or distant with his workmen; he considered them friends. But the inventor did have a temper. He was known to fire people in his fits of anger, although those he dismissed often returned the next day to resume work as scheduled.

When it came to hiring craftsmen, Edison put more stock in their manual skills and their perseverance in solving real-life problems than he did in their formal education. He had little respect for college degrees and even less for the standard curriculum of the time. He denounced traditional schooling for “taking up too much time teaching things that don’t count. Latin and Greek - what good are they? They say they train the mind. But I don’t think they train the mind half as much as working out practical problems.” As he told an interviewer late in life, “Doing the thing itself is what counts.”

Edison lived in a comfortable home in Menlo Park – a three-story Victorian-style residence with a roomy front porch, set on a large tract of land ringed by a white picket fence. Even though his house was just a short distance from his lab, accessible via a wooden boardwalk, he didn’t spend much time there. The house was spacious but not showy. Mary Edison, who in 1877 was still only twenty-two years old, was the mistress of an expanding household, which included four-year-old Marion (Dot), three-month-old Thomas Alva Jr. (Dash), Mary’s sister Alice, three servants, a coachman who lived above the stables, and three dogs, including a large, long-haired Newfoundland. Their third child, William Leslie, was born the next year.

While Edison seemed to enjoy being in the company of his daughter, particularly as she grew older, he would remain a distant figure to his two sons. He was dismayed when Tom Jr. and Willie didn’t display the same passion for tinkering with clocks and other machinery that he had shown when he was a boy. Once, when Willie was nine or ten, Edison wrested a toy train from his grasp, saying the lad was “too old” to be playing with such things. Tom Jr. was sickly as a youth, not at all the image of his industrious and action-oriented father.

Little is known about Edison’s relationship with Mary, probably because he didn’t have much of one. While he toiled endless hours at his lab, his wife felt isolated and anxious. “Mother was afraid of burglars and always slept with a revolver under her pillow,” Marion recalled. Edison, she said, “often would not come home until early morning, or not at all.” One night, he forgot his front door key and climbed up the trellis onto the porch roof to his bedroom window. “Mother, thinking he was a burglar, almost shot him,” Marion said. “She let out a scream which Father heard, then called out to her, preventing a catastrophe.”

Edison offered a wry, and revealing, comment on married life in a diary he kept in 1885. Marion, who was twelve at the time, had aspirations to write a novel, one that seemed to have autobiographical overtones. “Dot just read to me outlines of her proposed novel, the basis seems to be a marriage under duress,” Edison noted. “I told her that in case of a marriage to put in bucketfulls of misery. That would make it realistic.”

Menlo Park was a small, rural town, a far cry from the cosmopolitan Newark of Mary’s girlhood. “Mother was not very happy in Menlo Park as my Father neglected her for his work, or so it seemed to her,” Marion recalled. Mary had few female companions apart from her sister and some of the wives of Tom’s workers. While she was still stunning enough to turn male heads when she walked along the streets of Menlo Park, she began to grow plump and matronly. “She was a beautiful blonde,” Marion recalled, “and no wonder she was overweight for I have seen her and her bosom friend, Mrs. Reiner, sit down to a pound box of Huyler’s and giving me one lonely piece, eat every candy in it.” When Mary hosted parties for Newark friends, her husband didn’t attend. His world was his work.

By the time he arrived in Menlo Park, Edison was reaping the rewards of his many inventions. Even through the pain of his financial and legal struggles, his productivity continued unabated. In 1873 alone, he applied for twenty-five patents.

In 1875, he began experimenting with methods for making multiple copies of business documents, which resulted in an implement he called the Electric Pen. The nucleus of the apparatus was a needle-sharp point powered by a small electric motor, which, guided by a clerk’s hand, punched tiny holes in paper that created a stencil that could be pressed on blank paper and rolled with ink to produce copies. Despite initial resistance from clerks, the Electric Pen became a moderate success; Edison sold the pen, a battery, and an ink roller for a grand total of $16.

While the success of the pen itself was short-lived - displaced, in part, by the invention of the typewriter in 1868 - the A.B. Dick Company in Chicago later licensed the technology from Edison and used it as the basis for its roller-based copying machine, which it marketed as the Edison Mimeograph.

As handy as it was, the Electric Pen was not an earth-shattering invention, but Edison’s next venture would be revolutionary: the transmission of sounds, including voices, over telegraph wires. Initially called “acoustic telegraphy,” this technology was soon renamed “telephony,” and the instruments developed to transmit and receive sounds became known as “telephones.” Thomas Edison didn’t invent the telephone, but he did play an immense, though not always credited, role in its development.