The Thomas Edison National Historical Park preserves the laboratory complex on Main Street where Edison worked for over four decades, and Glenmont, his nearby Victorian mansion. The lab buildings are the centrepiece: the main laboratory, the machine shop, the chemical laboratory, and the library where Edison reportedly slept on a cot rather than go home. The equipment is still on the benches — measuring instruments, chemical apparatus, filing cabinets full of notebooks — giving the place the feeling of a working lab from which the occupants have only just stepped out.
The adjoining Black Maria site marks where the world's first film production studio once stood. Edison and his team used the purpose-built rotating studio to produce short films that became the first commercial movies. The original structure is long gone, but a replica conveys the extraordinary smallness of the space where cinema began. Allow two to three hours for the full complex; the guided tours of the main lab building are the best way to understand what you are looking at.