Thomas Edison died on October 18, 1931, at his home in West Orange, New Jersey, aged 84. He held 1,093 American patents. He had given the world the phonograph, the practical electric light, the motion picture camera and the means to record and reproduce sound, and he had built, at Menlo Park, the first industrial research laboratory, a place where invention was made a business rather than a stroke of luck.
He was self-taught. He had almost no formal schooling, and he had worked as a telegraph operator, and he made his first fortune young, from improvements to the stock ticker, and he used the money to build the workshop where he would work for the rest of his life. His method was not the flash of genius but the long grind, thousands of experiments, most of them failing, until one worked, and he is quoted as saying that genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
His record was not without argument. He ran a laboratory full of assistants whose work he patented under his own name, and he fought the long current wars against the alternating current that Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse backed, and he lost, and the direct current he insisted on was superseded. But the count of his patents, and the range of what they covered, has never been matched.
He became a national figure. The light bulb and the phonograph made him the most famous inventor alive, and his name was used to sell everything, and when he died the country marked it as the passing of an era. On the night of his funeral, some urged that the lights be dimmed for a minute in his honour, and the idea was carried out in a small way, a gesture toward the man who had wired the world.