Edison on Innovation: 102 Lessons in Creativity for Business and Beyond

9.4. Lesson 82: Create a Shop

Edison's laboratories—in New Jersey as well as in Florida—were more accurately described as laboratory–workshops. They had about them as much of the appearance of a machine shop as of a scientific research laboratory. There was good reason for that. From the beginning, when he set up his first full-time research facility in Newark, New Jersey, under the auspices of the Newark Telegraph Works, he drew up a contract that specified the provision of machine shop facilities as part of his "laboratory." Earlier, in Boston and New York, he had been frustrated by having to wait for outside machine shops to fabricate or modify parts and even entire devices for him. He resolved that henceforward he would always make sure ...