Menlo Park, New Jersey, was a real estate development that was named after the town of Menlo Park in California. The latter is towards the southern end of San Francisco Bay, about twenty miles south–east of San Francisco itself. Today, its chief claims to fame are that Facebook has its headquarters there and Google was founded there in 1998. Its population was just a tad over 32,000 in 2010.
Thomas Edison set up his home and his first laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1876. It was there that he invented the phonograph and developed a commercially viable electric light bulb.
Following the death of his first wife in 1884, Edison remarried and bought a house in West Orange, which was also in Jew Jersey but nearer to New York. The following year he bought some land in Fort Myers, Florida, and built a 'winter retreat' there. By this time he had outgrown his Menlo Park laboratory and he established new facilities in both West Orange and Fort Myers. Most of his buildings in Menlo Park either collapsed or were destroyed by fire, but in 1929 Henry Ford moved the two surviving buildings to his headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. They can be seen today as part of the Henry Ford Museum.
Edison died in 1931, aged 84. The site of his Menlo Park laboratory was renamed Edison State Park. There is a small museum, and a memorial tower was erected in 1938.
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