Thomas Edison

Thomas Jr.

Thomas Jr. was often sick as a child, but Edison left his care in Mary's hands.

Wanting to be an inventor, but not having much of an aptitude for it, Thomas Jr. became a problem for his father and his father's business. Starting in the 1890s, Thomas Jr. became involved in snake oil products and shady and fraudulent enterprises. The situation became so bad that Thomas Sr. had to deal with his son through attorneys and agreed to pay Thomas Jr. an allowance in exchange for not using the Edison name. He struggled with problematic drinking and depression. Thomas Jr. had a disastrous one year marriage, which began in 1899 and caused scandal for himself and the senior Edison.

Mina

Thomas met Mina Miller at the World Cotton Centennial in December 1884. She was the daughter of the inventor Lewis Miller, who had made significant personal wealth by selling a wheat mower for which he had invented several improvements. He was a co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution, and a benefactor of Methodist charities. Mina enjoyed the socialite lifestyle and practiced a strict Methodist faith her whole life. She was a family friend of the Gillilands' and Edison met her several times in 1885 while working on a project with Ezra in Boston. He joined her for the Chautauqua gathering in 1885, but their flirting was dampened by the religious nature of the gathering. He proposed to her after the two took a trip in September.

On February 24, 1886, at the age of 39, Edison married the 20-year-old Mina Miller (1865–1947) in Akron, Ohio.

They had three children:

Madeleine Edison (1888–1979)

Charles Edison (1890–1969)

Theodore Miller Edison (1898–1992)

Marion, Thomas's eldest daughter, often came to the laboratory at Menlo park during her childhood. As an adult, she did not get along with Mina and moved to Germany in 1894. She returned in 1924, after divorcing her unfaithful husband.

According to Tesla:If Edison had not married a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect.

In his second marriage he was also often neglectful of his wife and children. When he was around, he was extremely controlling. He left nearly every aspect of housekeeping and child rearing to Mina and her five maids. One exception was the Fourth of July: being deaf, Edison enjoyed the very loud booms made by fireworks. He made his own fireworks into which he added a small amount of TNT. Edison wrote Mina love letters about missing her while he was away for extended periods.

Madeleine stated she had few childhood memories of her father, and he was typically only home once a week during her childhood. She married John Eyre Sloane.

Theodore was named after Mina's brother, who died in the Spanish–American War shortly before she gave birth. Theodore went on to study physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After working for Charles while their father stepped down, Theodore decided to become an independent inventor running his own lab.

Charles studied general science at MIT and took over his father's business after his death. Later he served one term as Governor of New Jersey (1941–1944).

Health

In December, Edison was housebound due to pleurisy. He recovered, but by May 1887 he needed emergency surgery to treat abscesses below his ear. He had surgeries there again in 1906 and 1908. He was completely deaf in one ear and barely hearing in the other. Edison had diabetes.

Property

In 1885, Edison bought 13 acres of property in Fort Myers, Florida, for roughly $2,750 (equivalent to $98,542 in 2025) and built what was later called Seminole Lodge as a winter retreat. Edison purchased a home known as Glenmont in 1886, in Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey. He sold it to Mina in 1891. Edison liked boats, cars, and fishing. He drove only on very limited occasions, but, for research purposes, owned several cars which helped him bond with his son Charles, who he encouraged to drive even as a child.

Religion and metaphysics

Historian Paul Israel has characterized Edison as a "freethinker". Edison was heavily influenced by Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Edison defended Paine's "scientific deism", saying, "He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity." In an October 2, 1910, interview Edison stated:

Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me—the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love—He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us—nature did it all—not the gods of the religions.

Edison was labeled an atheist for those remarks, and although he did not allow himself to be drawn into the controversy publicly, he clarified himself in a private letter:

You have misunderstood the whole article, because you jumped to the conclusion that it denies the existence of God. There is no such denial, what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter. All the article states is that it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made.

Edison explored and promoted ideas in panpsychism.