Little Adventures

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Finding Edison

You don't hear much about Thomas Edison these days, but he was a superstar in his time. Sure you know that he invented the light bulb, the motion picture camera and the phonograph, but he has now been relegated to the role of distinguished historical figure. No longer do the newspapers hang on his every word. No more are motion pictures made of his comings and goings. No more does every boy want to go work with Edison on his latest invention. Edison is dead, he died in 1931, 14 years before I was ever born, yet he has long been one of my heroes and I have often felt disappointment that I missed him.

One summer in the late seventies Pam and I were in Ohio driving along I-80 when we saw a sign for the Edison Birthplace. It was a pleasant day and we had time on our hands so we decided to investigate. Edison was born and reared for a while in a nondescript two story frame house in Milan, Ohio. We toured the place with a guide who was writing a book about Edison and who regaled us with adventuresome tales of Edison's youth way back in the 1850s. What a life he led in his early days! I wanted to know more, and our guide said that the best book to read until his was published was called A Streak of Luck. He was even good enough to sell me a copy. I read it and I was hooked. I wanted to visit the scenes of Edison's triumphs, I wanted to examine his inventions more closely, and most of all, I wanted to understand how his mind worked.

Later that year, on a cold, drizzly Sunday in November we were in the neighborhood of Menlo Park where Edison invented his light bulb. For a lark, we went driving around the town looking for signs of my hero. We were rewarded for our efforts with a view of a squat ugly memorial to the light bulb, which was closed anyway. Nothing else relating to the great man seemed to remain. Henry Ford had carted off Edison's laboratory, and the people of New Jersey had erected other buildings on the land. For me the spirit of Edison had departed. I was distressed by this, but that in itself was interesting, and I fell to asking myself just exactly what is was that I was after.

On our honeymoon we caught up with Edison's laboratory where it now stands at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. This was more like it. Here was the actual building where so many wonders were invented, here were the tools, here were the reference books, and here were the actual inventions! Not bad, not bad at all. One of Henry Ford's more interesting ideas was to gather together the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop, Edison's laboratory, Ford's own first automobile manufactory and many other places of invention. He had these buildings transported to Greenfield Village, which was opened to the public about 1930. Greenfield Village today boasts a large and clean museum of mechanical devices in addition to the original village. People come in droves and destroy the atmosphere of the place entirely. Still if you come as we did, early on a showery Monday, and if you hold your head just the right way, and if you half close your eyes you can catch a faint glimpse of the way things used to be. Here just for a minute I sensed the spirit of Edison. I felt as he must have felt when his light bulb first glowed, and I seemed to share the flash of inspiration that lead to the building of the phonograph. I went away satisfied.

Just last month, I found myself in Miami with a day to spare, and so I followed the Alligator Alley across the waist of Florida to Fort Myers, where Edison maintained a winter home in his later years. It was here that he worked out a process for extracting rubber from goldenrod. I visited in hopes of a repeat of my experience at Greenfield Village, but I picked the wrong day to visit. The place was packed with elderly, full-time tourists who had come to see the flowers and spend a pleasant day but who cared very little about Edison. I tramped around in a group led by a man who knew his flora but knew precious little else. We zoomed through the workshops and dawdled in the gardens and I was very unhappy.

When we came to the backyard of the Edison house, I had had enough and I fell behind the group. Just there a pier juts out toward the Gulf of Mexico and bird houses sit on piles driven into the floor of the bay. The guide told us that when Edison wanted to be alone he would sit at the end of this pier and fish. His family knew that he was not to be disturbed in his fishing, and since he did not put a hook on his line the fish did not disturb him either.

As I stood there on that muggy February afternoon, the sounds of the day grew mysteriously quiet. A strange electricity seemed to surround me, and I remembered Edison's life with the same sense of satisfaction that he must have felt as he sat here fishing. It was a distinctly spooky experience, but as I walked away, I knew that this time I had really found Edison.