Perhaps the most famous image of Thomas Edison is a photograph taken in 1888, showing the inventor after three days of nearly constant toil on his improved wax-cylinder phonograph. The disheveled Edison is slumped before his handiwork, eyes intense, brooding.

A large oil painting based on that photograph hangs in the library at the Edison Laboratories, known now as the Edison National Historic Site. In 1887 Edison left Menlo Park, New Jersey, and erected a sprawling research and manufacturing complex amid the secluded greenery of West Orange, New Jersey. Shortly after the laboratories opened, Edison set to work perfecting the phonograph. The original tinfoil cylinder device had languished for a decade, a dazzling but impractical novelty. Finally, goaded by the threat of competition, Edison turned to readying the device for the marketplace. After months of work, culminating in a seventy-two-hour vigil, an industry was born.

Edison directed research at West Orange for more than forty years, until his death in 1931, amassing more than five hundred patents and transforming the industrial landscape of a nation. Henry Ford snatched away the remnants of the Menlo Park “invention factory” in the 1920s, but the seven low brick buildings of the West Orange laboratories remain much as they were a century ago. Research at the labs came to a halt in the mid-thirties, and they reopened as the historic site in 1947.

I visited the Edison site last fall as it marked “100 Years of Industrial Research.” The transformation of the portrait in the library from black-andwhite photograph to somber-hued painting seemed to represent an apotheosis: from Edison the inventor to Edison the myth. The painting presides over the two-tiered library, where ten thousand volumes, a mineral collection, statuary, and accolades are enshrined in Victorian splendor.

Elsewhere, though, workaday reality prevails. Lou Venuto, director of visitor services, led me through the cluttered guts of the machine shop, where parts for prototype inventions were once fashioned on imposing machines run by a pair of electrically powered drive shafts spanning the high ceiling. Edison claimed that his facility could fabricate “anything from a lady’s watch to a locomotive”—an exaggeration renL dered plausible by the sight of the adjoining supply room, overflowing with doweling, drill bits, coiled lengths of wire, even antlers, sharkskin, and elephant hide. “There are more than forty thousand items here,” Venuto said, showing me a yellowed page from an inventory list detailing such items as horsetails, hogs’ bristles, and human hair (long, female).

The chemistry lab, situated in a nearby building, contains the predictable but intriguing arrays of bottles, flasks, and beakers. Much of Edison’s work centered here in his final years, as his staff researchers sought to isolate a domestic substitute for rubber. Venuto handed me a mottled, brown spongy thing, a specimen derived from goldenrod.

Outside, a replica of the Black Maria sits conspicuously. Named for its resemblance to the horse-drawn police wagons of the period, the original Black Maria was the world’s first motion-picture studio. The ungainly construction of wood and tar paper was built in 1893 for filming kinetographs—silent snippets of vaudeville acts, boxing matches, and other entertainments.

Capturing motion photographically did not originate with Edison, but it was at West Orange that it became commercially practical. Pioneering work in exploiting “persistence of vision”—the quirk of human perception that allows a rapid succession of images to be perceived as a fluid whole—had been done by others in the 1860s and 1870s. Eadweard Muybridge had rigged up a system using multiple cameras to record the gallop of horses, while E. J. Marey built a cumbersome apparatus involving photographic plates mounted on a wheel.

With W. K. L. Dickson, Edison began work in 1887 on a new kind of motionpicture camera. A breakthrough came in 1889, when George Eastman introduced a tough, flexible celluloid film that could be cut into strips and rolled, and Edison’s 1889 kinetograph camera was essentially the same device used in Hollywood today. Rollers and sprockets advanced a perforated strip of film, holding each frame in place momentarily as it was exposed by a rotating shutter. An improved version developed the following year introduced the standard 35-mm width for motion-picture film.

Kinetographs were viewed on a kinetoscope, a coin-operated cabinet that displayed ghostly, flickering images through a peephole. More than a thousand of them were filmed in the Black Maria. Its gabled roof swung open, and the entire building rotated on a central pivot, tracking the sun’s progress across the sky to keep maximum light in the studio all day.

In 1903 a new glass studio in the Bronx replaced the Black Maria. By then films were being projected onto screens, and they had become more ambitious. I sat down in a small auditorium at West Orange to watch a videotape of The Great Train Robbery . This famous eleven-minute Western features surprisingly crisp cinematography and relatively sophisticated techniques, such as the pan, simple match cuts, and several primitive special effects. When the robbers fire their pistols, the gun barrels erupt with lurid gouts of blood-red smoke. As was the occasional practice, parts of the film were hand-tinted; flames, gunshots, and women’s clothing were colorized frame by frame and print by print.

Many of Edison’s innovations are displayed in the main building, among them the incandescent bulb, the original phonograph, a model of a pouredconcrete house (full-size versions were cast from gigantic molds), a printing telegraph, and an upright bipolar dynamo.

Across the street stands a monument of a different kind: the last of the massive Edison-built factories that used to gird the complex. Now occupied by several small manufacturing concerns, the poured-concrete building still echoes with the clanking, ferrous sounds of raw industry.

Guided tours of the Edison site are given every Wednesday through Saturday. For more information, phone 201736-1515, or write the Edison National Historic Site, Main Street and Lakeside Avenue, West Orange, NJ 07052.

SHOPPING FOR SHELTER: Between the time of the roughhewn settler’s cabin and that of the high-rise glass condo there was an era when aspiring homeowners could choose their dwellings from the pages of a Sears, Roebuck catalog. From 1908 to 1940 Sears sold more than a hundred thousand houses, from small summer cottages to massive colonial mansions. Customers ordered them by mail; Sears shipped them (some assembly required) by railroad.

Sears’s Modern Homes Program began in 1906, when Frank W. Kushel, manager of the chinaware department, took over the organization’s failing building materials department. The first catalog of mail-order houses from Sears offered twenty-two models, priced from $650 to $2,500. The package included plans, specifications, and most of the material—lumber, roofing, doors, cabinets, downspouts, even nails. The customer had to supply little more than the concrete, labor, and, of course, real estate.

By applying mass-production techniques to building construction, Sears could offer sturdy, comfortable houses—many still stand today—more cheaply than those built by standard means. They could be built quickly too. The precut lumber (a boon in a time when powered woodcutting equipment was not readily available) was numbered for easy identification. On average, a Sears house could be put together in about two-thirds the time it took to construct a conventional one. A low-cost Simplex Sectional fourroom cottage could be nailed and fastened together by two men in a single day.

Houses by Mail , by Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl (Preservation Press, softbound, $24.95), identifies individual Sears houses from among the more than 450 styles offered over the course of thirty years. Styles are classified according to roof type and number of stories. Descriptions of the individual models include illustrations, floor plans, and the original glowing ad copy, winsomely evoking archetypal landscapes of Middle America.

The Torrington, a colonial model, appeals to men with its “ruggedness of construction” and to women with its “beauty and style.” Upward mobility, or at least its appearance, is a recurring theme. The Ellsworth was designed for property owners in upscale neighborhoods who “wanted to build small, inexpensive homes but were afraid they could not get permits or would be criticized by adjoining homeowners. …” The Ellsworth puts its best face forward, the projecting living room and vestibule and a looming chimney endowing the tiny house with an appearance of vastness.

For the less status-conscious, Sears offered no-nonsense houses of concrete blocks. For nonaffluent families with big ambitions, the Double-Duty, a one-story, four-room affair, was designed to convert easily into a two-car garage.

The Modern Homes Program died in 1940, but many of the houses have lived on, an array of homes reflecting the ever-changing but always familiar face of the American dream.