Edison's Last Breath
In a museum case in Dearborn sits a test tube of air from the room where Thomas Edison died in 1931, sealed at his son's request and later sent to Henry Ford. It has long been called Edison's last breath, and a later story holds that Ford believed the soul leaves the body in the final exhale.
Field Guide Entry
Henry Ford's devotion to Thomas Edison began when Ford was a young engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company and Edison personally encouraged his gasoline car experiments. The devotion never cooled. Ford moved Edison's entire Menlo Park laboratory complex to Greenfield Village, his history campus in Dearborn, and reassembled it down to imported New Jersey soil. He opened the museum, originally named the Edison Institute, on the 50th anniversary of the incandescent light bulb with Edison himself present. When Edison lay dying in New Jersey in October 1931, a rack of open test tubes stood in his bedroom. His son Charles had the attending physician seal them immediately after the inventor died, and one sealed tube was later sent to Ford.
The tube is real, labeled, and on display at the Henry Ford Museum. It first appears in a May 1951 inventory of items moved to the museum from Ford's Fair Lane estate after his wife Clara's death, listed as a "sealed test tube containing (?)." No more was heard of the tube until 1978, when it turned up in its cardboard mailing tube, with Edison's hat and shoes, under a display case in an exhibit on Henry Ford's life that had been installed in 1953. The story attached to it is the mystery: that Ford believed the soul exits the body with the final breath, and wanted Edison's captured, either as the ultimate relic of the man he worshipped or as something stranger. The museum catalogs it as Test Tube, "Edison's Last Breath," 1931, with the name in quotation marks. At minimum, the glass holds some of the air from the room where Edison died.
The deflationary reading comes from Charles Edison himself. On June 27, 1953, he wrote to the radio commentator Walter Winchell that "a rack of eight empty test tubes" stood close to his father's bedside. He asked Dr. Hubert S. Howe to seal them with paraffin immediately after his father died, and he later gave one to Ford. The museum holds the letter only as a photocopy. The museum's curator, William S. Pretzer, wrote in 2004 that neither Charles nor Henry Ford is known to have called the tubes Edison's last breath: "That embellishment was left to others."
Visiting Information
The test tube is displayed in the Made in America: Power exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, open daily, roughly 9:30am to 5pm; buy tickets on site or online and check current hours before visiting. Greenfield Village next door, home to the relocated Menlo Park laboratory, is ticketed separately and closes in winter.
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