Edison in Florida

About this book

In 1885, America's greatest inventor, the "wizard" of electricity and Yankee industrialization, established a second home in Florida. Unlike the many wealthy turn-of-the century vacationers who descended on Florida's tourist cities to unwind and escape, Thomas Edison chose a "cow town" in the Florida outback. In the mid-1880s, he built a modest house and a laboratory under the palm trees of Fort Myers, and this "green laboratory" became a quiet wellspring of invention for the next forty years. In this first book devoted to Edison's life and work in Fort Myers, Olav Thulesius reveals Edison the nature lover and medicine man. He traces Edison's first trips to Florida for simple health reasons and then follows Edison's expanding interest in the natural world, his camping trips with John Burroughs, his opposition to the exotic bird trade for the millinery business, his fascination with sponges, and his late experiments with the hybridization of rubber and goldenrod. Thulesius also explores his relationship with Fort Myers neighbor Henry Ford and with Harvey Firestone, and the founding of the Edison Botanic Research Company of Fort Myers.