--- title: The Real Wizardry of Edison's Menlo Park Lab | TIME description: Menlo Park, where Thomas Edison and his team perfected the lightbulb and phonograph, was, essentially, the world's first research and development lab canonical: https://time.com/video/Yl6o1KIC/ og:title: The Real Wizardry of Edison's Menlo Park Lab og:description: Menlo Park, where Thomas Edison and his team perfected the lightbulb and phonograph, was, essentially, the world's first research and development lab og:url: https://time.com/video/Yl6o1KIC/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Yl6o1KIC/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Real Wizardry of Edison's Menlo Park Lab twitter:description: Menlo Park, where Thomas Edison and his team perfected the lightbulb and phonograph, was, essentially, the world's first research and development lab twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Yl6o1KIC/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The Real Wizardry of Edison's Menlo Park Lab > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The Real Wizardry of Edison's Menlo Park Lab [Watch (HLS stream): The Real Wizardry of Edison's Menlo Park Lab](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Yl6o1KIC.m3u8) (2:42)  _Published 2010-06-30. Menlo Park, where Thomas Edison and his team perfected the lightbulb and phonograph, was, essentially, the world's first research and development lab_ --- Jul 27, 2023 2:22 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Thomas Edison: Movie \(and Talkie\!\) Pioneer](/video/NgmTtjP2/) ### Thomas Edison: Movie (and Talkie!) Pioneer [Thomas Edison's Incredible Talking Machine](/video/e3W59g0F/) ### Thomas Edison's Incredible Talking Machine [Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle](/video/sAl3scYg/) ### Thomas Edison and the AC/DC Battle --- ## Transcript >> Come to think of Edison, the inventor and what made Edison so important was that he's the first, sort of the heroic inventor to figure out modern innovation. He created the whole system of innovation from the idea through laboratories or really had the beginnings of research and development and team research and a group effort like to develop new technology. >> When he established his first laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey it was effectively the world's first research and development facility of the kind that large corporations of every kind to have now. He brought together many different kinds of technicians, machines, people from many nations: Germany, Switzerland, and England. And they specialized in several different kinds of science and technology and he basically brought them together to become what he called an Invention Factory. >> What sets Menlo Park apart from other research environments that year was the multipurpose capabilities they had there. There's analytical capability. There's measuring capability, but there's manufacturing capabilities. In isolation, those things existed elsewhere, but this sort of notion of putting it all together. And then aligning that with a business prospective, you know, creating things that were actually gonna have a place in the market that people maybe haven't quiet anticipated they wanted, but this individual, Mr. Edison had kind figured they were going to do. That's the magic there. >> It was a different way of working and he really institutionalized that [ unk ] as important, the contribution as he made almost as any individual device that he invented. There are locations like Menlo Park, places like the Googleplex, which is the Google headquarters. Places like the Microsoft Campus and the Apple Campus. There are these centers of innovation now and they are all descended in some way from Edison. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The Real Wizardry of Edison's Menlo Park Lab","description":"Menlo Park, where Thomas Edison and his team perfected the lightbulb and phonograph, was, essentially, the world's first research and development lab","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Yl6o1KIC/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2010-06-30T22:39:08.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Yl6o1KIC.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/Yl6o1KIC/","duration":"PT2M42S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/Yl6o1KIC/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```