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By Root 1068 0

stained-glass windows and carved wood paneling. A clerk in a dry goods firm had built and furnished the house at a cost of about $400,000, but his employers soon discovered that he had embezzled most of that money. The clerk fled to the West Indies, his firm assumed ownership of the property, and Edison bought it, furnished, at the fire-sale price of $235,000. Glenmont became home to Edison's three children from his first marriage, and over the next decade Edison and Mina would add three children of their own—a daughter, Madeleine, born in May 1888, and two sons, Charles and Theodore.28

GLENMONT SAT at the crest of a hill, commanding sweeping views of the Orange River Valley, which was mostly undeveloped at the time. "See that valley?" Edison asked his secretary one day as the pair enjoyed the scenery.

"Yes, it's a beautiful valley," the man replied.

"Well, I'm going to make it more beautiful. I'm going to dot it with factories."29

Edison's first project in the valley was not a factory but a new laboratory, which he began building in the summer of 1887. At that time, his lighting business was thriving, with more than 100 central stations across the country. In Manhattan Edison had expanded from the financial district uptown all the way to Forty-second Street, and there were also major stations in Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and St. Paul. All of the central stations purchased bulbs, dynamos, fixtures, and other equipment from the Edison manufacturing companies: the Lamp Company, Machine Works, Bergmann & Company, and Tube Company. Since Edison owned majority stakes in all of these companies, a large proportion of the companies' growing profits went directly into his pocket.30

As a result, the inventor could afford to build himself an extravagant workshop at a cost of more than $150,000 (the equivalent of nearly $3 million today). Constructed on a fourteen-acre plot half a mile from Glenmont, the laboratory looked like a tidy factory complex. It consisted of a main building, three stories high and 250 feet long, as well as four one-story buildings set perpendicular to it. The first smaller building held sensitive electrical equipment, the second a chemistry lab, the third a chemical storehouse and carpentry shop, and the fourth a metallurgy lab. Copper wires ran underground from a powerhouse—or dynamo room, as it was known—to all of the other buildings, supplying 100-volt direct current for lighting and power. The grandest space was the library, at one end of the main building, which had parquet floors, Oriental carpets, tall tropical plants, and polished wood bookcases holding one of the world's best private collections of scientific books and journals.

Visitors entering the heavy machine shop on the first floor encountered a chaotic scene. Leather belts whirred across the ceiling to spin the drive shafts that provided power; enormous machines roared as they planed, bored, rounded, and cut iron and steel; grimy workmen hammered and filed the new metal castings of the devices under construetion. Up a steep staircase lay another room as large as the first, with a similar range of activities, only here the noise was a few octaves lower, the machines more dainty, the workmen a bit cleaner. This was the precision machine shop, where men worked on the more delicate equipment, such as the intricate brass workings and delicate needles of the phonograph. Edison's private experimental room was on this floor. Nearby were a drafting room, where spectacled men turned Edison's rough sketches into precise plans for new machines, and various experimental rooms. The third floor held more experimental rooms and a large space used as a lecture hall and phonograph recording studio.

Edison's Orange, Newjersey, laboratory complex.

One of the most remarkable parts of the laboratory was its stockroom, which, as Edison had planned it, held "almost every conceivable material of every size," including shark teeth, walrus hide, narwhal horn, tortoise shells, ostrich feathers, peacock tails, printer's ink,