Gilliland, or “Mamma G” as he calls her in the Diary, introduced him to Mina Miller sometime before the vacation. Some months earlier Edison had asked Gilliland’s wife to introduce him to marriageable girls.
Damon now, that is, at the time of the Diary, works for the Bell Telephone Company, which had purchased Edison’s patents on improvements to the telephone. Ezra Gilliland is a friend of Edison’s from his youthful telegraph operator days, when they were known respectively as Damon and Pythias (as in the Roman legend) because of their close friendship. The vacation is mostly at Ezra Gilliland’s rented summer seashore retreat called Woodside Villa, near Winthrop, Massachusetts, on Boston Harbor. He has already invented the phonograph (though not yet developed it commercially) and his light and power distribution system. At this time in his life he is a widower with three children, and looking for a wife. The diary is almost completely unscientific, much of it whimsical or describing the mundane in purposely grandiloquent language. This webpage presents the complete text of the diary transcribed from a facsimile of the original.Įdison was 38 at the time and the vacation was his first sustained break from work in 26 years. Thomas Edison kept a diary while on vacation during the summer of 1885. The Diary of Thomas Edison << Various and Sundry