Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison died at Glenmont, the house above his West Orange laboratory, on October 18, 1931. He was eighty-four. Born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847, and raised in Port Huron, he left the schoolroom early, sold papers on the Grand Trunk, and learned the telegraph the way other boys learned a trade. Night was when the work got done. Menlo Park and then West Orange were not shrines. They were factories of trial: the lamp that lasted, the current that could be sold, the phonograph that startled a room, the motion-picture devices that taught a century to sit in the dark. He hired chemists and night men and kept a score of failures that the public never counted. He married twice and raised children in the house on the hill. When cities dimmed their lights the night he died, it was a courtesy, not a conclusion. The laboratory is a park now. The patents are still in the language of machines.