Thomas Edison is remembered as a lone genius. The historical record tells a more complicated—and more interesting—story.

This board is part working archive, part thinking space for a book in progress. It brings together primary documents, biographies, technical histories, and scholarly reassessments of Edison’s work, his laboratories, and the systems he built around invention.

I’m especially interested in the tension between myth and method: Edison as symbol versus Edison as manager, collaborator, and businessman. The Menlo Park model, the role of assistants, the pace of trial and error, and the emergence of industrialized research all matter more than any single lightbulb moment.

The throughline here is demystification without debunking. Edison was neither saint nor fraud. Understanding how he actually worked tells us more about innovation—then and now—than hero stories ever could.