Thomas Edison National Historical Park

The industrial-scale laboratory where roughly half of Edison's 1,093 patents were born, including the world's first motion picture studio, a rotating tar-paper shed that helped invent the movies.

By 1887, Thomas Edison had outgrown his famous Menlo Park laboratory and built a far larger, more industrial complex in West Orange, New Jersey, complete with a machine shop, chemistry laboratories, and a three-story library. Unlike the small operation at Menlo Park, West Orange functioned almost like a modern research and development company, with teams of engineers and technicians working simultaneously on dozens of projects under Edison's direction.

It was here that Edison's team developed and refined the Kinetograph motion picture camera in 1891, and in 1893 built the 'Black Maria,' a tar-paper-covered structure mounted on a circular track so it could rotate to follow the sun, widely considered the world's first motion picture production studio. The lab also produced major improvements to the phonograph, refining Edison's wax cylinder recording technology into a commercially viable product.

Edison worked from West Orange until his death in 1931, and roughly half of his eventual total of 1,093 U.S. patents trace back to work done there. His nearby home, Glenmont, a Queen Anne mansion in Llewellyn Park, is preserved alongside the laboratory complex as part of the same historical park, which was designated a National Monument in 1955 and redesignated Thomas Edison National Historical Park in 2009. Edison's earlier, smaller Menlo Park laboratory was later relocated entirely to Greenfield Village in Michigan.