Thomas Edison Center Guided Tour

Tours run every half hour from 10 am to 3 pm.  Our tours lead guests through Thomas Alva Edison’s life story, specifically focusing on his time at Menlo Park, where he invented recorded sound and perfected the incandescent light bulb. Each tour includes the museum’s two galleries and entry to the Edison Memorial Tower. During the tour, guests will hear 120+ year-old Edison phonographs and be able to type on an original Civil War-era telegraph.

Exhibits include personal belongings of Thomas Alva Edison, the original Menlo Park lathe, early light bulbs, an 1882 dynamo generator, 120+-year-old Edison phonographs, artifacts from Edison’s experimental electric railroad, scaled model of Edison’s laboratory, and hands-on demonstrations. The themes covered include the establishment of the world’s first research and development laboratory, the presentation of the incandescent light bulb, the development of a complete electrical distribution system, the invention and progression of the phonograph (the invention that earned Edison the title of the “Wizard of Menlo Park”), and the twentieth-century commemoration of Edison’s accomplishments.