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 college dean and soon-to-be Navy veteran, as Howard's successor. The former estate of the Leon F. Douglass family, which was adjacent to Menlo, housed a rehabilitation center for World War II veterans until 1946. The Douglass family supported Menlo in acquiring the newly vacant property, and plans were made to move the school (grades 7 to 10, and later, 11 and 12) to that area. The School of Business Administration (SBA) was established in 1949 as the college's first four-year program. This was a timely move, as Stanford had just dropped its undergraduate business courses to focus more on the