The history of America is rife with rags to riches stories, often including the protagonist becoming a wealthy robber-baron, traveling around the world on a yacht directing his empire by remote control and late in life giving away incalculable sums of money to help leave a positive legacy.

So it was amazingly refreshing to tour Thomas Alva Edison’s West Orange laboratories and become steeped in the history of a man who never rested and never even changed much as he became amazingly wealthy and influential. Year after year he started new projects often leading to new companies all while working shoulder to shoulder with his 150 fellow “muckers” in the labs. His companies ran the gamut from cement to movie making with the battery being one of his most lucrative and the electric lightbulb his best known.

Perhaps only Walt Disney (at least of those that come to my mind) was the near equal of Edison in terms of his involved passion and eventual influence. Of course its easy to argue that Edison’s inventions were more transformative since they helped bring light and sound to much of the world.

In a way similar to his friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone Edison also helped usher in the great age of American industrialism. He surrounded his labs with factories which produced his companies’ products, employing over 10,000 North Jersey workers at their peak.

Edison’s breadth as a scientist, inventor and entrepreneur is quickly apparent from the shops at his lab. Starting with a state of the art Chemistry lab where he worked on the battery and on a natively produced rubber from plant hybrids to an array of wood and metal machine shops where the specialized tooling for his factories was created the labs also included a recording studio for his phonograph and music company, a record vault, a movie studio and a full up photo lab for documenting everything.

Realizing the value of research he had a library that for science was probably the Google of its day and a storeroom where he stocked every material he could find in the world in case one of his researchers needed to sample or test it for a project.

He clocked in and out like any of his employees so time spent could accurately be allocated to each of the projects and from looking at the records spent more time at the lab than most of them—periodically venturing the 1/2 mile to his beautiful estate to spend time with his family.

Hats off to a different kind of American hero.

Photographing the shops proved tricky as they are not well lit now (perhaps they never were) and tripods are not allowed for visitors per National Park Service rules. So I used a combination of high ISO to deal with the dim conditions and HDR to help with the back light of the large windows to try to convey what the labs might have been like.