NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. -- Thomas Edison is credited with many important inventions, buut luckily for him, some of his more eccentric creations, like concrete furniture and the perpetual cigar, have gone largely unnoticed.
The 1,093 patents received by the Menlo Park genius are far and away the most given to any one American. And among them are some real gems that either never went anywhere or lost Edison a great deal of money.
'They didn't all turn out to be commercially successful,' said Reese Jenkins, who heads the $6 million, 20-year project to compile, edit and publish Edison's documents.
The 138th anniversary of Edison's birth is Tuesday, dubbed National Inventor's Day in his honor.
Edison, the inventor of the incandescent electric light bulb, the phonograph and the motion picture, also tried to float the idea for a helicopter with box kites on the ends of the rotors. The idea for the contraption never got off the ground.
The inventor-enterpreneur lost $2 to $3 million on an iron-ore milling venture at a time when $10,000 was a fortune.
Edison hoped the process would revive the slumping iron mining industry in the 1890s, and established a large milling operation in northern New Jersey. The mill bombed, thanks to a vast supply of iron discovered in Minnesota.
So Edison used the factory's machinery to start up a cement works, trying to create markets for his product by developing cement houses, factories, and even furniture.
Those products 'went over like a cement balloon,' said Leonard Reich, a project member.
The 'perpetual segar' (sic), conceived around 1877, was a tube-shaped device containing a plunger on a spring that pushed the tobacco against a screen near the mouthpiece.
A never-ending cigar must have left a poor taste in investors' mouths, because there is no evidence a prototype was ever built.
'Edison certainly sweated; he had concerns and problems,' said Jenkins. 'I think to show him simply as having one success after another is an illusion, a real distortion. In doing that we lose the human dimension, the real life blood.'
One of Edison's colossal blunders was sticking with the losing side of the AC-DC controversy. As a pioneer in the field of electricity, Edison preferred to work with the direct current, even when it became clear that an alternating current was better for transmitting electricity over long distances without power loss.
