Three Newark schoolgirls sheltered from the rain in the doorway of Edison’s factory on Ward Street, New Jersey. Invited inside by an employee who knew them, they encountered Thomas Alva Edison, busy working on the teletype for stock market quotes. Mary Stilwell, one of the three girls, a 15-year-old woman, was struck by his eyes and by how dirty and greasy they must be. Mary Stilwell and Thomas Alva Edison married on Christmas Day 1871. They moved into their new home at 53 Wright Street in Newark. In the first year of their marriage, Edison successfully filed 39 patents. It’s notable that the early stages of Edison’s two marriages (he remarried a second time after Mary’s death at just 29) exhibit striking parallels. In both cases, he falls in love with girls who are still in school, and in both cases, in the spring. He pursues them all summer, marries them after the summer according to the rites of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and in the following months, the marriage becomes a volcano of ideas that he immediately patents and implements. Ultimately, both wives give him first a daughter and then two sons.
