Inside the Invention Factory with Kathleen Carlucci

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to AMSEcast. With support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, we’re continuing our series on 250 years of American innovation in preparation for our nation’s semiquincentennial in 2026.

0:49 To help us do that, our guest today is Kathleen Carlucci, the director of the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park. With degrees in history and secondary education, Kathleen brings to her role great experiences in management and customer service. I knew when we started this series that one person we absolutely had to discuss was Thomas Edison. So Kathleen, we thank you so very much for joining us from Menlo Park. Oh, it’s my pleasure. Happy to be here. I’ve read about Edison before, but every time I do, I’m just amazed. He acquired an astounding—and you tell me if I’m right or wrong [laugh] —1093 patents. What was his process for coming up with these ideas and then actually bringing them to fruition?

1:30 I’d be happy to discuss that, and as a matter of fact, 1093 patents, that’s in the US alone. He also has 1250 patents in 34 countries— Oh, my gosh. Okay [laugh] . —just to gild the lily somewhat. So Edison, he saw needs for things. He would read something, and then he would try to make, like, a fix, if you will. I mean, that’s really where good invention becomes successful. And of course, Menlo Park through his trial and errors, this is where he’ll develop the team concept approach to invention. And so, this is the birthplace of research and development, which is noted throughout the world.

2:11 Last year alone, we had visitors from 38 different countries, and I never have to explain who Thomas Edison is, okay? So, he created that approach here at Menlo Park. And when he was here in the mid to late-1870s into the early-1880s this was the largest complex in the world doing what he was doing. So, some people say that the concept we know today called ‘big science’ really began there at Menlo Park. Absolutely. So, let’s step back to the young Edison. At an early age, from what I understand, he lost much of his hearing. So, how did he deal with that challenge as he made his way through this amazing career? We often talk about that to our guests here at the museum.

2:53 So, you know what’s really ironic? I remember reading that Edison said his loss of hearing was a gift because it enabled him to concentrate. One example is, when he was a young man and he was a telegraph operator. They would be in these shops with maybe 10, 20, 30, telegraphers, and the machines would be clicking, and these were all audible at that time; they didn’t have printed out messages. But he could hear the click of the telegraph well, the Morse code coming across, whereas the conversations going on between his workmates was more subdued. And some of his workers later on said they thought his hearing loss, he pulled it out when he needed to.

3:37 But his hearing loss would unfortunately get worse as he gets older. So, you talked about the telegraph. I know he did early work on the telegraph and the telephone. So, what improvements did he make to those devices? At the time Edison was born, the telegraph was very new. Maybe it had been out ten years and it was the first long-distance communication system in the world. And at that time, that was the height of technology. And so Edison, he’s enthralled with it. He’ll actually read a book, and he and his neighbor will build their own telegraph system, just between their two homes. They would memorize the Morse code.

4:17 You know, he was not only, like, reading about it, but he was creating, at a very young age. But a very big circumstance and his desire to learn more about it, he becomes a telegrapher. And part of your job as a telegrapher was you had to be able to, basically, take the machine apart, put it back together in your sleep or with your eyes closed. And so, he develops this really amazing understanding of the mechanicals of it and what it takes to make it. Later on, he’ll also do some improvements. He, along with other people, will create what they call a duplex telegraph. Later on, he’ll be working for a division of Western Union—which he had worked for at that time—that was the largest employer in the world, and he got a job working for a division of theirs called the Gold and Stock Company, and he’ll create a better working telegraph after he leaves their employ.

5:11 He creates what’s known as the quadruplex, and he’ll gain a lot of money and notoriety in those circles for that item. Now, regarding the telephone itself, it would be Edison moves into Menlo Park in 1876. That’s the year Alexander Graham Bell will get the patent on the telephone. Now, many people were working on the telephone, you know, worldwide, many people, where they knew it was coming. Edison, too, was working on it. And it really didn’t work properly, even though Bell does get the patent for it, it was kind of like, if you think of those old commercials, “Can you hear me now?” And they would have to, at that time, say no because the transmission—it’s like that old game, you know, if you made a telephone when you were a kid, you could hear it if you were close together; when you got further apart, you really couldn’t hear it.

5:58 And so, Edison will start working on an improvement on that, and through that, ironically, through his working on making the carbon button transmitter, which, wait a minute, hold on your hat, they were in every phone—Edison’s transmitter—until the 1980s when phones became digital. He conceived of the idea of a machine he called the phonograph, and that would lead him to worldwide recognition, and he would be known as, from then on, the Wizard of Menlo Park, which is where I’m talking to you from. This just amazing. I use that word a lot, but it’s truly a phenomenal story. When he sets up Menlo Park, how is that lab organized?

6:38 How does he staff it? Well, you know, he’s actually living and working in Newark, New Jersey, which is the biggest city in New Jersey, and he doesn’t own the property, the building where he’s at. And it’s a congested city. I mean, it’s big, right? It’s still a very big city. And so, he’s looking to move out more into the country. And he finds a failed housing development called Menlo Park, which was located right on what was then the Pennsylvania Railroad. It’s still our Northeast Corridor today; it’s just three blocks down the street from where I’m sitting right now. You know, he starts developing new ideas, and he brings some of the men who are working with him from his Newark shop—you know, maybe four or five, maybe not even that many at that time—he moves into his 100-foot long, 25-foot wide, two-story laboratory he had his father oversee the construction of.

7:30 While that was being constructed, he actually took a boat over to England, was conducting research with the transatlantic cable of the telegraph, which still, that whole concept of that blows my mind, that they have these giant cables running from North America to Europe. It’s just incredible for the that period of time. And when he comes back, he’s working on new inventions. He sees some amazing electrical test instruments there. It’s really like a game changer, I think, and so he will bring men in as he needs them. And people are hearing about this man. Like, he’s so famous. He’s world famous after he invents the phonograph, and people will come and offer to work for him, I’ve heard for free, some of them.

8:14 I tell our students that come visiting today that’s called an internship. And you know, but he did pay them whatever the going wage was. And so, he was really attracting some amazing people. He only hired the best, really. So, he would hire physicists, machinists, glass blowers, mechanics, carpenters, I mean blacksmiths. I mean, just all these people, and they would all bring their skills together, and they would work. That’s the team concept. That was the development of the team concept. Inventing is a race, right? There are a lot of things people knew were coming. They knew the electric light was eventually coming, they knew the telephone was coming, and so people wanted to be first.

8:59 And, you know, back in those days, most of the research was done in academic institutions, universities all over the world. They were doing research for research’s sake. Edison took that concept and he blew it up. And instead of being like that lone inventor working in his shop, in his attic, in his basement, and then having to go to a glass blower and having, oh, I need a piece of glass six inches long by, you know, this diameter, wait in the queue for his time to come up for it to be produced, or going to a machinist and say, “Can you make this for me?” He decided, let me bring all of them together. Now, Edison will nickname the laboratory here at Menlo Park his invention factory, and they will ultimately create 400 patented inventions in less than seven years, still his most prolific period.

9:51 He later moved to West Orange, New Jersey. Why did he make that move, and what went on then at Menlo Park? Edison was working at Menlo Park. He does this amazing demonstration. He calls everyone, come and see what I’ve created, the perfected incandescent light—of course, he never invented the light. They had lights; they had arc lights out—but he’ll perfect incandescent light. And he invites the world to come here for a demonstration on New Year’s Eve, 1879. And once, he wows the world, like, I like to say, he lit their imagination with the possibilities, he had gotten permission from the alderman of New York City, from Manhattan to put down, like, a one-mile square demonstration, if you will.

10:35 And he does that. By the way, this is an interesting fact. They put all of their electric wires underground. I like to say, Edison had a healthy fear of electricity because it is dangerous, and it was really a newer medium to be working with, right? And unfortunately, people do get hurt working with it even today, and so he wanted to take that extra precaution. While in New York, like, basically with his workmen digging up a place that they’ll put down his wire, His young wife, Mary, takes ill and passes away. But he’s right on the cusp of the biggest project of his life, right, creating the electrical industry, designing the grid.

11:17 He has three motherless children now that were all at Menlo Park with her. He brings them to New York City, which he had been traveling back and forth on the train from, and he—well, two years later—remarried. But by now, he’s working with JP Morgan, Vanderbilt, you know, a lot of really rich industrialists and people who are interested in the future, and are also interested in business, and they create—JP Morgan and Edison are founders of what we know today as General Electric. It once was known as the Edison General Electric Company. Edison remarries two years after his wife’s death, and now he’s a rich man, and he buys her a beautiful estate in the first gated community in America called Llewellyn Park, which is, at that time, Orange, New Jersey, and it’s a beautiful home, Glenmont.

12:09 It still belongs to the—you know, it’s a national park today. And maybe a year to 18 months later, he’ll build a site up there, a research site up there, but it’s actually way bigger because he’s got more money, more clout, and that’s why he moves up there. So, in terms of the light bulb itself, certainly he creates essentially the electric grid, as you’re talking about, and gets the ability for that to spread around the country and around the world. What was it specifically about the bulb that he created that has latched on to saying, Edison is the creator of the incandescent bulb, or among those that created it? What did he do special with the bulb?

12:49 Oh, sure. Because what’s different from the arc lights that were at that time, they were like a public type thing. They were down, like, the Champs-Élysées in Paris, they may have had them on the Strand in London, they were outside lights. They were blinding, right? And then you had to have these, you know, units close by to power them. And they were very loud and dangerous. Well, they were so loud even after Edison, those units—that’s why he’ll, like, try to put them underground, you know? More, in a basement type situation. But what Edison wants to create is electric light for the masses. And so, he actually famously says, “I’m going to make electric light so affordable that only the rich can afford candles.” I mean, we try to tell people that, you know, I have a lot of school groups that come here, and a lot of families, you know, people from all over the world, and we tell them, like, you had to actually measure out, you bought so many candles for the week—you know, unless you had gas, which only, of course, the rich had, technically—and then you had to limit your time.

13:54 Like, you know, people woke up with the sun and they went to bed when the sun went down because lighting was expensive, and it just burned away. And so, they were looking for other uses. And of course, the electric light will be way less dangerous than the gas light, and of course, the candles that people in lower economic circumstances at that time could afford. So, the cavalcade of accomplishments continues. He had a role in inventing and popularizing motion picture technology. What was that role? So, Edison actually had an assistant working with him, William Dixon, and he was a photographer by trade. Edison, of course, all his work was, you know, photographed and publicized because he wanted to inspire investors, you know, to come join him.

14:42 But William Dixon, you know, people had been working on the idea of motion pictures, if you will. You know, you have the Lumière brothers over in France. There were a lot of different groups. But Edison always just takes things a notch up, or five notches up. He’ll be working with George Eastman from the Kodak Company. They create the notch system in the film. The First Motion Picture studio—the first building ever built as a motion picture studio, was in what’s now known as West Orange. They have, actually, the beautiful, it’s probably about a 60-year-old replica, but it looks just like the original. I mean, just, like, the circumstances, like, listen to this: so they built it on a train trestle so they could turn it.

15:26 They opened the roof manually with a rope so they could get the best light. So, they would have to be able to turn this little building. They called it the Black Mariah because it looked like a paddy wagon. That’s what they used to call paddy wagons at that time. And just, you know, they would film things that no one had ever seen before, like Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter, you know, or boxing, you know, which, at that time, was illegal. Little tricks—actually, the first cat videos were done there. Like, so, way ahead of, you know, YouTube, or TikTok. Of course. I’m surprised it wasn’t the first video [laugh] . It was close [laugh] . It was close. It was close. So, one last thing.

16:06 He worked in the world of batteries. What did he do with batteries? When I first started here a number of years ago, I could say at that time that there were more electric cars then than now. Well, of course, that has passed, but he was actually really doing a lot of research—as others were—on electrifying cars. This all stems back from the time when he creates these amazing electrical grid systems. And then people who own big boats, people who had trains, they want electric light, so how are you going to transfer that to that? Because they’re not stagnant buildings, you know, or structures, so you need to have something moving, and so all of that ties in together.

16:48 Edison actually will make his fortune in batteries. They used to have a battery plant up in Orange, and I believe now part of that is [unintelligible] . I mean, he probably was the town of Orange at one time. Now, of course, that section is called West Orange. And he employed a lot of people. Listen, this is one thing I like to say about Thomas Edison. He doesn’t invent things; he invents systems. He will invent the electrical system. He will then invent the recording system, invent the motion picture system. He doesn’t just do things and then let them sit there, right? He’s actually changing the way they are. You know, you asked me a question before about lighting.

17:28 People had been working on electric lighting for decades. The one thing that really, just, always I admire is it didn’t work right away for Edison. And that’s true of a lot of different things he worked on. But he doesn’t give up. He tries to figure out what’s the problem. Now, the problem with the lighting was that the filament was getting so hot that it was burning up or it was exploding. And he’s like, staring at this, what they called lamps; they didn’t call them light bulbs at that time, and they say he was rubbing a piece of lamp black, which is basically carbon, between his fingers, trying to figure out the problem. And then it’s kind of like that eureka moment.

18:09 Oxygen. There’s too much oxygen inside. That’s why, when all these people say, “But I was working on the electric light. It should be my invention,” if you took him to court, the judge would always say, “But did you have the vacuum pump?” Not just a vacuum pump, but a better vacuum pump that he’ll help create here at Menlo Park. All that early work was done here at Menlo Park. And that’s really what you have to look at. He just is always trying to improve. Even his phonograph. Sometimes his workers would say, like, the managers of the phonograph division would say, “It’s good enough.” I always like to say, he probably said, “But that’s my name on that machine.” Like, he was always trying to make things work better.

18:52 And, you know, in our museum, we play phonographs that are 130 years old, so it certainly is a testament to how long Edison’s products did last. Yeah, you talked about, he would have points along the way where he was not making progress than he would. Were there any things that you know of where he started something and was not able to get to where he wanted to get with an invention or a system? Well, so what happened with the phonograph was, he invents that and he demonstrates it in 1877, but then less than two years later, he’ll perfect incandescent light. He thinks the phonograph is going to be a good teaching tool, or his initial idea was it was going to record the telephone calls.

19:35 Can you imagine? Like, I grew up we didn’t have an answering machine, but it’s really, like, incredible. You know, how far forward he could think with different inventions. So, he basically puts it on the shelf for ten years while he creates Con Ed, basically, right? And then he pulls it back down, and he creates an industry out of it. So, that was true of many things. See, one of the things we’ve learned, Edison wrote down everything in notebooks. He learned this early from a patent attorney to do that. Like, somebody who was a mentor to him when he was a—even before he moved to Menlo Park. What a, just, amazing amount of beautiful inspiration reading through these books.

20:19 So, we have learned he was working on things we weren’t even sure of. Not only did Edison have all these patents, he actually has the basis for the first patent electronics. I mean, talk about mind-blowing. Like, it actually sells patents to Marconi. I mean, it’s really an incredible life. It truly is. And if you look at the next 250 years, I know that’s a little bit of time, but as we come on the semiquincentennial, what lessons do you talk about there at Menlo Park that come from Edison that future innovators should pay heed to? I really think that not being discouraged. I think that is the greatest, greatest gift. Edison was not discouraged.

21:00 And he brought all these men in, and of course, they were an integral part of the work he was doing here, but the ideas did come from him. And he also had many inventions going at the same time. He wasn’t just working on A or B or C. He had many different things. I remember reading, and I wish I could tell you what the patent was, but he was working on that transatlantic cable I mentioned earlier, and it didn’t—it was a failure, their experiment. They were working on the printing telegraph. My understanding is, like, one word was sent over and it, like, was ten foot of paper, so that wasn’t going to be practical. And so—because there was a resistance problem. Later on, he’ll take that resistance problem and use it to a positive effect in another invention.

21:45 Like, it’s just incredible. It’s not just that he had a good memory, which, of course he did, but he really listened. And one of my former docents, a volunteer here at the museum, he used to say—and he was an engineer—he liked to say that Edison found simple solutions for complex problems. And that seems to be, like, really the key for so much that he does here. But not getting discouraged. We have a lot of children who visit us, and if they’ve read, you know, that iconic book, The Wizard of Menlo Park—I have so many adults that tell me, “Oh, that was the first book. I loved Edison ever since I read that.” And you know why? Because they feel like they could be Edison with hard work, not giving up.

22:30 Like, when they were children, they thought, “You know what? If I work hard and I keep perseverance, maybe I can make a difference in the world.” And I think we can all agree, Thomas Edison certainly [laugh] made a difference in the world. Oh, did he. Did he. And that’s a great lesson. So, when visitors, those kids, or when us adults come to the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, what do you get to see? What does the tour include? So, we give a fully escorted tour. It’s not a large museum, although we are working on fundraising for a new, larger museum. We are a 36-acre State Park, New Jersey State Park. The town of Edison, which of course, changed their name to Edison from Raritan township in 1954, they lease it, and then a non-profit manage the museum.

23:12 So, while we do have three storage units filled with artifacts, we actually have a lot in this space. But it’s the tour. It’s the telling the story of young Thomas Edison, Listen, warts and all. We talk about setting fire to the train and burning down the family barn. Like, he made mistakes, but he was really encouraged to pursue—maybe a little more carefully—but to pursue his interests. So, we have original testing devices, personal items of Edison’s, amazing photographs and sketches. Because at that time you didn’t have photographs in newspapers. They would—a photographer would take pictures, but then they had to make a wood cut, and we have quite a few of those.

23:57 And then when we go in our back room, we have machinery that he used here. We demonstrate how it was worked. We have original phonographs, Menlo Park and later light bulbs, part of his experimental electric train. You know, it’s just that whole taking people, telling them the story. And this is the thing I’ve learned working in museums for these years: you want people to feel emotion. We have them laughing, we tell them about issues that happen that could have been dangerous, and then we talk about sad things, of course, also, like, his wife passing away here. But we really try to evoke the emotion so they’re really getting the whole pie, if you will.

24:40 And plus, we’re the site of the Edison Memorial Tower, which is a beautiful art deco structure built by his workers. They raised the funds during the Great Depression. It’s a 131-foot tower. It was actually in Life Magazine in 1938. And we have a giant almost 14-foot light bulb on top that still lights the way. It lights every night. And the tower itself does play—of course—Edison music. But we really talk about that. And we do have hands-on for the kids, too. And believe me, it’s not just the kids that are under 18; it’s the kids and all of us. They’re lighting up light bulbs using our little generators that came out of old-fashioned telephones, very simple explanations for series and parallel circuits.

25:29 We talk about Edison’s delving into iron ore separation. They get to see that. And then, of course, they all—ah, it’s always a contest to see who can have the highest number of being a human battery. And so, it evokes that emotion in all of us from when we were young. Well, I can’t wait to visit. Where can our listeners learn more about the center and about how they can set up a tour? Oh, absolutely. So, we are the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, and our website is menloparkmuseum.org. Wonderful. Well, Kathleen, I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on AMSEcast. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you, and I hope to see you. Yes, I’ll be there.

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