The Night Edison's Factory Burned

On the evening of 9 December 1914, a small explosion went off in a building at Thomas Edison's industrial complex in West Orange, New Jersey.

The building was used for making and inspecting motion-picture film, which at the time was made of celluloid, a highly flammable material. Within minutes the fire had spread. It jumped from building to building, fed by chemicals, film and wooden fittings. Fire companies came from towns all around, but the water pressure was too low, and the flames were too fierce.

Thousands of people gathered to watch. The night sky over West Orange glowed red.

The man who lit the world

By 1914, Thomas Edison was one of the most famous people on Earth. He had developed the phonograph, which recorded and played back sound. He had made the electric light bulb practical and built the systems to power it. He held more than a thousand patents. His laboratory at West Orange was one of the first modern research centres, where teams of people worked on inventions together.

He was also sixty-seven years old.

Now he stood and watched as the fire swept through around a dozen of the buildings in the complex. Production facilities, equipment and records were destroyed. Estimates of the damage at the time ran into millions of dollars, and his insurance covered only a fraction of it, partly because the buildings were made of concrete and had been thought fireproof.

"Go and get your mother"

Edison's son Charles later described the night in a memoir that has been retold many times. According to his account, his father came to find him in the crowd and told him, with great excitement, to fetch his mother and her friends, because they would never see a fire like this again.

When Charles worried about what the fire would mean for them, his father is said to have replied that there was value in disaster, because all their mistakes had been burned up, and now they could start fresh.

Historians point out that the exact words have been polished over the years, and the most famous versions of the quote cannot be confirmed. But the reports agree on what Edison did next.

The next morning

The fire was still smouldering when he began rebuilding.

The newspapers reported that Edison told them he was not too old to make a fresh start, and that he would begin again immediately. He brought in hundreds of workers. Cleanup crews cleared the ruins. Some of the concrete buildings had survived structurally, and work started to restore them. He borrowed money; his friend Henry Ford, the car maker, is reported to have lent him a large sum.

Within weeks, parts of the operation were running again. Within a few months, production had restarted, and, by his biographers' accounts, the business was soon earning more than before.

It was not easy, and it was not painless. Workers lost wages, and the losses were real. But Edison's reaction, more than the fire itself, is what people remember.

Why the story lasts

It would have been understandable for a man of sixty-seven to retire after watching so much of his work burn. Instead he treated the ruins as a building site.

Edison was famous for his attitude to failure. In his laboratory, an experiment that didn't work was not a waste. It was a result. It told you one more way that did not succeed, and brought you one step closer to one that might. In a sense, he looked at the fire the same way.

He lived for another sixteen years and kept working almost to the end, experimenting late in life with ways of making rubber from plants. He died in 1931.

Want to read more?

Paul Israel's biography, Edison: A Life of Invention, written by the director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers project, is a detailed and careful account of his life and work. The Edison Papers website at Rutgers University has digitised millions of pages of his notebooks and letters, free to explore.