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Home > Invention > Menlo Park > Woodworking Shop |
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Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park
In the center of the shop sits parts of the Combination Gas Machine from Detroit, Michigan. This
apparatus provided Edison purchased the Combination Gas Machine in June 1877, but the delivery of the machine was
delayed by that summer’s great railroad strike. The strike reminded Edison and his workers that
transforming America into an industrial nation would be a difficult and conflict-ridden process. |
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Thomas Edison’s skilled woodworkers made models, parts of scientific apparatus, and patterns
for metal castings of machine parts in the Woodworking Shop. Using traditional hand tools and a few
simple hand- or foot-powered machines, they made the small wooden object needed by Edison’s
laboratory operation. The woodworking shop is an illustration of Edison's reliance on traditional
crafts to turn his fantastic ideas into realities.
illuminating gas used in the laboratory’s gas lights, Bunsen burners, and furnaces. A large
copper drum was rotated by a cable attached to a large weight. Air trapped in the drum was combined
with gas from an outside tank to create the illuminating gas.