Thomas Edison had created the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then controlling its application. Edison's name is registered on 1,093 patents. Edison began his career as an inventor in Newark, New Jersey, with the automatic repeater and his other improved telegraphic devices, but the invention that first gained him wider notice was the phonograph in 1877. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," New Jersey. His first phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a grooved cylinder. Despite its limited sound quality and that
Menlo College School was subdivided into two separate parcels. A third parcel, the Menlo Athletic Fields, will still be jointly owned and managed. Menlo College received its largest gift to date, a $21.3 million bequest from the Hope Bartnett Belloc Trust, in 2008. Belloc named Menlo as one of three beneficiaries of the total trust amount—around $60 million—in response to the college's mentorship of her son, Martin, during the 1962-63 academic year when he was a student. The other two recipients were United Cerebral Palsy North Bay in Petaluma, California and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2009, Menlo