Innovation & Flight

Leet Township, PA · est. 2018

Opened in 1917 in the former Watson family home, this institution began as a residential school for children with disabilities. In 1952 it became the stage for one of medicine's great turning points: Dr. Jonas Salk, aided by medical director Dr. Jessie Wright, carried out the first human trials of his polio vaccine here, working with patients, staff, and neighborhood children. The success of those tests led to the vaccine's 1955 approval and the eventual near-eradication of a disease that had terrified a generation of American families.

Lubbock, TX

On the eve of World War II, the United States realized it would need pilots by the thousands and launched the Civilian Pilot Training Program to turn college students into aviators. At Texas Technological College in Lubbock, roughly 6,500 cadets moved through the program, and half of them took to the air from this dirt-runway field run by local flyer 'Dag' Dagley. When the war's demand for pilots faded, the field closed and its quarter-section became the College Heights neighborhood.

Dalhart, TX

In May 1942, as the U.S. mobilized for World War II, flat, dry-skied Dallam and Hartley Counties made an ideal training ground, and Dalhart Army Air Field opened as a glider school for the new Waco CG-4A "Hadrian." Cadets learned to be snatched aloft on nylon tow ropes behind C-47s and to fight as infantry once they landed. As the war's needs shifted, DAAF retrained to turn out B-17 crews and then B-29 bombardment groups — one of them, the 393rd Bomb Squadron of the 504th Group, becoming the core of the unit Col. Paul Tibbets led to drop the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. The field closed that December.

Baltimore, MD

Daniel Coit Gilman was the first president of Johns Hopkins University and the first director of its hospital, positions from which he reinvented American higher education. Championing original research and graduate study, he built an institution modeled on the pursuit of new knowledge rather than rote instruction. His example reshaped universities across the country.

Lower Allen Township, PA · est. 1965

Daniel Drawbaugh, born in this village in 1827, was a self-taught mechanic who claimed to have devised a working telephone and sought a patent in 1880. Bell Telephone contested his claims, and in 1888 the courts decided in Bell's favor, leaving Drawbaugh a fascinating footnote in the contested history of the telephone. He worked on his inventions here until moving to nearby Camp Hill in 1904, where he died in 1911.

Hollidaysburg, PA · est. 1989

Daniel Hale Williams spent his boyhood in Hollidaysburg before rising to the front rank of American medicine. In 1891 he founded Provident Hospital in Chicago—one of the nation's first interracial hospitals and a training ground for Black nurses and doctors barred from white institutions. Two years later he performed one of the earliest successful operations on the human heart, and he went on to lead Freedmen's Hospital in Washington and help charter the American College of Surgeons.

Darby, PA · est. 1952

Set aside in 1682 as William Penn's Quaker colony was taking root, the Darby Friends Burial Ground has received the dead of this community without interruption for well over three centuries. The land was donated by John Blunston, an English Quaker who founded Darby and rests here himself. The grounds also hold the grave of John Bartram, the largely self-taught colonial botanist whose plant collecting and famous garden near Philadelphia earned him fame on both sides of the Atlantic.

Philadelphia, PA

David Rittenhouse (1732–1796) was one of early America's foremost men of science — an astronomer, clockmaker, and instrument builder who won fame for observing the 1769 transit of Venus and later served as the first director of the United States Mint. This sundial marks the site of his birth and honors his mastery of astronomy and horology, the precise measurement of time. A self-taught Pennsylvanian, he embodied the Enlightenment ideal of the patriot-scientist.

Catasauqua, PA · est. 2001

David Thomas carried a hard-won secret across the Atlantic from Wales: how to smelt iron using abundant, slow-burning anthracite coal rather than scarce charcoal. Settling in the Lehigh Valley, he built the Crane Iron Works, widely credited as the first anthracite iron furnace to succeed both technically and as a business. His breakthrough transformed eastern Pennsylvania's hard-coal region into an industrial powerhouse and earned him the title "father of the American anthracite iron industry."

McHenry County, ND

David Thompson, born in 1770, was one of the greatest land geographers of his age, a fur trader who mapped vast stretches of the northern interior with astonishing accuracy. In 1797 and 1798 he passed through this region on a scientific and trading expedition, taking the astronomical observations that let him chart the country that would become North Dakota. Working for the fur companies of British North America, he ultimately surveyed and mapped nearly two million square miles of terrain.

Catasauqua, PA · est. 2023

Founded in the iron-rich Lehigh Valley in 1865, the Davies and Thomas Company mastered a demanding new craft: casting the heavy iron plates that line tunnels bored beneath rivers and cities. Its segments went into landmark works of American infrastructure—the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and railroad bores—as well as projects overseas. A sample of its tunnel lining was proudly displayed at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

Avalon, PA · est. 1987

In the decades after the Civil War, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers set out to tame the Ohio River for year-round navigation. Their first lock and dam on the river, built here between 1878 and 1885, was a marvel of its day—the largest movable dam yet constructed, with the world's first rolling lock gate and its widest lock chamber. It served until 1922, when the nearby Emsworth Locks and Dams replaced it.

Austin, TX

Soon after the United States entered World War II, the Army Air Corps established an air base on Del Valle land once part of a Mexican land grant, with the City of Austin buying 3,000 acres to lease to the government. Opened in 1942 as a troop-carrier training center, it was renamed for Capt. John A. E. Bergstrom, Austin's first war casualty, killed at Clark Field in the Philippines in December 1941. Crews trained here flew in the invasions of Normandy and beyond, and over the next half-century the base served through the Berlin Airlift, Korea, and Iraq before closing in 1992 and becoming Austin's international airport in 1999.

Buffalo, NY

Delaware Park is the crown jewel of Buffalo's pioneering parks-and-parkways system, designed in the late 19th century by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—the same partnership behind New York's Central Park. Rather than building a single park, the designers wove a network of green spaces linked by tree-lined parkways across the growing industrial city. The historic view captures Delaware Park Lake and Vaux's "Spirehead" gazebo around 1890, when the landscape was reaching maturity as a genteel Gilded Age refuge.

Dallas, TX

For decades, engineers struggled to interconnect the growing tangle of transistors and components that made up modern electronics — a "tyranny of numbers" that threatened progress. In 1958, Texas Instruments engineer Jack St. Clair Kilby solved it by forming all the components of a circuit within a single piece of semiconductor material. On September 12, 1958, he demonstrated the first working integrated circuit to colleagues on this site.

Cherrytree Township, PA · est. 2004

In the frenzied years after Colonel Drake's 1859 strike, Pennsylvania's Oil Creek valley became the cradle of the world petroleum industry — but moving crude in leaky wooden barrels by wagon was slow and wasteful. In 1865 brothers James and Amos Densmore mounted two large wooden tanks on a flat railway car at nearby Miller Farm, each holding dozens of barrels, and shipped a successful test load to New York City. The design spread almost overnight, with hundreds in service within a year, and it set the template for the steel tank cars that still carry oil today.

Palestine, TX

A 1954 Palestine High graduate, Don Hastings caught the knifemaking bug when a Hollywood film about Jim Bowie sparked a craze in his high-school metal shop. He mastered first the stock-removal method and then, after meeting bladesmith Bill Moran in 1972, the ancient art of forging Damascus steel — a technique then practiced by only a handful of people worldwide. A co-founder of the American Bladesmith Society, he earned its mastersmith rank in 1981 and helped launch a bladesmithing school before his death in 1986.

La Veta, CO

This memorial honors Doris Bristol Tracy, one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), the pioneering program created in 1942 that trained women to fly military aircraft on non-combat missions so male pilots could deploy. The WASP ferried planes, towed gunnery targets, and tested aircraft; decades later, in 2009, the surviving members were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Tracy's marker ties a small Colorado town to that national story.

Jesup, GA

Born in Ohoopee, Georgia in 1862, Alexander Jackson Gordon floated logs down the Altamaha River to pay for medical school, graduating from the Georgia Medical College at Augusta in 1888. After practicing in Lyons and Waynesville, he settled in Jesup in 1917, buying the local drugstore and joining a boyhood friend's practice. Beyond medicine he served on the city council, helped found two Presbyterian churches, introduced Hereford cattle to Wayne County, and — true to his Hippocratic oath — saw his last patient the day before he died in 1943.

Towanda, PA · est. 2016

In the early twentieth century few women held senior posts in American science, yet Alice Evans built a career as a federal bacteriologist just as germ theory was reshaping public health. Her research traced a dangerous recurring fever in people to bacteria carried in unpasteurized milk, and she spent years pressing a skeptical dairy industry and public toward pasteurization. Her path began here in the Susquehanna Valley, at the collegiate institute where she was educated.

Pleasanton, TX

When the FCC lifted its postwar freeze on new radio stations, chiropractor-preacher-rancher Ben Parker and his wife Mona—both veteran broadcasters—helped form a local company that won a permit for Pleasanton station KBOP in 1951, its call letters nodding to the "bop" of emerging rock & roll. Broadcasting first from the Parkers' ranch, KBOP mixed news, country music, and Spanish-language programming that other stations ignored, serving rural South Texas listeners. Mona Parker, who built the tower and transmitter, was the first woman in the United States to earn an FCC first-class engineering license.

Amarillo, TX

Dr. Charles Newton Gould, an Ohio-born, Kansas-raised scientist who taught his way into paleontology and geology, became a pioneer of using earth science to hunt for oil and gas. His reading of the Texas Panhandle's rock led him to pick the drilling site for the 1918 Hapgood–Masterson well, opening the enormous Panhandle-Hugoton gas field—the world's greatest known source of helium—and he set the location of the region's first oil well the next year. Gould also identified the Alibates flint quarries as the source of tools made by Ice Age Folsom hunters, a landmark discovery in American archaeology.

East Fallowfield Township, PA · est. 2005

Born in the Quaker village of Ercildoun in Chester County, Charlotte Moore Sitterly became one of the leading physicists of her era. A career researcher with the U.S. Bureau of Standards, she authored more than a hundred books and articles and produced authoritative reference tables on the spectra of the sun and other elements. Honored by the American Astronomical Society in 1937, she became the first woman elected to Britain's Royal Astronomical Society in 1949.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2015

Dr. Constantine Hering, a German-born physician, settled in Philadelphia and became the leading figure in American homeopathy during the 19th century. He helped establish the country's first homeopathic medical society and its first homeopathic medical college, and he authored foundational texts still cited in the field. From a home office on this site he pursued the research and teaching that shaped a major alternative medical movement.

Port Lavaca, TX

Born near Port Lavaca in 1909, Edward F. Knipling grew up watching the screwworm fly ravage livestock, an experience that shaped his life's work. As a USDA entomologist he pioneered the sterile insect technique—flooding a population with sterilized males to collapse it—a once-controversial idea that eventually wiped the pest out of the United States by 1972. His wartime work on insect control also earned him national and international honors.

Boerne, TX

Born in Hesse-Darmstadt in 1820, Dr. Ferdinand Ludwig von Herff came to Texas in 1847 with die vierziger, a band of idealistic young Germans whose Bettina socialist colony soon failed; he returned, married, and settled near San Antonio in 1850. Over more than fifty years he became one of Texas's great pioneer physicians, achieving surgical breakthroughs and helping bring the railroad and St. Mary's Sanitarium to his retreat at Boerne. A Union sympathizer who nonetheless served briefly as a Confederate brigade surgeon, he treated all in need, including Native Americans.

Easton, PA · est. 1993

Born on this Easton ground, biochemist Florence Siebert overcame the lasting effects of childhood polio to build a pioneering scientific career. In the 1920s she developed a method to make intravenous therapy safe by eliminating the fevers caused by contaminated solutions, and in 1934 she refined the tuberculin skin test into a reliable form. Her purified protein derivative became the international standard for detecting tuberculosis.

Pacific Grove, CA

This IEEE Milestone plaque in Pacific Grove, California, honors Dr. Gary A. Kildall, who demonstrated the first working prototype of CP/M in 1974. CP/M became one of the earliest widely used operating systems for microcomputers, laying groundwork for the personal computing revolution. Kildall's innovation helped make general-purpose software possible across many different early machines.

Upper Darby, PA · est. 1985

George Smith wore many hats—physician, judge, scientist, and state senator—settling at the Collenbrook estate in 1829. He helped found the Delaware County Institute of Science and wrote its first county history in 1862. As chairman of the Senate's Education Committee, he drafted the landmark 1836 law that created Pennsylvania's first public school code.

Austin, TX

Dr. Gideon Lincecum, born in Georgia in 1793, served in the War of 1812 before becoming a self-taught frontier naturalist of international reputation. His studies of Texas plants and insects—especially the harvester ant—won him correspondents abroad, including Charles Darwin. He died at Long Point in Washington County, Texas, in 1873.

Del Rio, TX

John R. Brinkley made a fortune peddling dubious cures — most infamously goat-gland surgery marketed to restore men's vigor — and pioneered the use of radio to reach a mass audience. Hounded by the American Medical Association and federal regulators, he relocated to Del Rio in 1933 and beamed his message across the country from a powerful 'border blaster' station just over the line in Mexico. Flamboyant and free-spending, he pumped money into the local economy during the Great Depression before authorities finally shut his operation down in 1938.

Williamsburg, VA

On the campus in Williamsburg, Virginia, this living memorial honors Dr. John T. Baldwin, Jr., a College of William & Mary graduate (class of 1932), botanist, and Phi Beta Kappa scholar. Rather than a stone monument, his legacy is marked by a collection of woody plant species—trees and shrubs gathered for study and enjoyment. Baldwin spent his career as a scientist and educator devoted to cultivating, in his own words, a "verdant heritage" for future generations.

Canonsburg, PA · est. 2017

When the Civil War began, battlefield medicine was a chaos of scattered wounded and improvised care. Jonathan Letterman, a career Army surgeon raised in Canonsburg, rebuilt it from the ground up: a tiered system of triage, dedicated ambulance and supply wagons, and an orderly chain to move the injured from the firing line to the rear. At Gettysburg his methods treated the wounded of both armies, and the framework he devised became the backbone of modern military medical evacuation.

Nacogdoches, TX

A Nacogdoches valedictorian who took his degree from Stephen F. Austin with the highest marks the college had seen, Joseph William Kennedy went on to Berkeley, where in 1940 he and colleagues Glenn Seaborg, Edwin McMillan, and Arthur Wahl discovered the element plutonium. He built the detection instruments essential to early radiochemistry and, from 1943, helped develop and test the atomic bomb on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, earning the Medal of Merit from President Truman. He later chaired chemistry at Washington University before his death in 1957.

East Carroll Township, PA · est. 1959

Born on a farm about 400 yards east of the highway, Dr. Lawrence F. Flick became a pioneer in the fight against tuberculosis, then one of the deadliest diseases in America. He was among the first to recognize that the illness was communicable, organized the first American tuberculosis society in 1892, and founded the White Haven Sanatorium in 1901. His work helped move TB care toward fresh-air treatment and public-health prevention.

Paducah, KY

Dr. Reuben Saunders (1808–1891) was a pioneering Western Kentucky physician credited with discovering that hypodermic morphine and atropine could halt cholera during Paducah's 1873 epidemic. He telegraphed his prescription to other stricken communities and was honored by medical associations in the United States and Europe. An early advocate of fresh air for pneumonia and tuberculosis, he was also the grandfather of writer Irvin S. Cobb; his son, Dr. John Bartlett Saunders, researched leprosy in Hawaii and served as the Hawaiian king's personal physician.

Austin, TX

Robert Lee 'R.L.' Moore (1882–1974) was one of the leading American-trained mathematicians of the twentieth century. A University of Texas graduate who earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1905, he developed a famous inquiry-based teaching approach — the 'Moore Method' — that had students prove or disprove results themselves rather than absorb lectures. Returning to UT Austin in 1920 for a five-decade career, he lived in this house, guided 47 students to doctorates, founded a branch of topology through his Foundations of Point Set Theory, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

New York, NY

This memorial honors Dr. Ronald E. McNair, a gifted physicist and NASA astronaut whose words about curiosity and perseverance are preserved here. Raised in the segregated South, McNair earned a doctorate in physics and became one of the first African Americans to fly in space. He was killed in 1986 aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, and communities across the country—including here in Brooklyn—named parks and schools in his memory.

Harrellsville, NC

As a young man the future army physician Walter Reed lived at a house that stood just south of this Hertford County marker. Reed later led the U.S. Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba in 1900–01, whose experiments proved that mosquitoes, not filth, transmitted the deadly disease. That discovery opened the way to controlling yellow fever and saving countless lives.

Brookville, PA · est. 2018

In the decades after the Civil War, American medical schools faced a grim shortage of cadavers for anatomical study, and the gap was filled by grave robbers who plundered fresh burials—a scandal that horrified the public. Dr. William J. McKnight of Brookville, a country physician who rose to the state senate, helped craft Pennsylvania's 1883 Anatomy Act, which created a board to lawfully distribute unclaimed bodies to medical colleges. The law made body-snatching a crime while giving future doctors a legitimate way to learn their trade.

Union Township, PA · est. 1946

On a wooded flat near Titusville in 1859, Edwin Drake gambled on a radical idea: drilling for oil the way one drilled for water or salt. When his well struck oil that August, it proved petroleum could be produced in quantity, and a scramble of derricks and boomtowns soon filled the Oil Creek valley. The state now preserves the site with a park and museum on the ground where the modern oil age began.

Cherrytree Township, PA · est. 1948

On this Venango County ground in August 1859, Edwin Drake's crew struck oil with a purpose-drilled well, proving that petroleum could be pumped from the earth in quantity. The gusher of interest that followed transformed the quiet creek valleys of northwestern Pennsylvania into the world's first oil boomtowns almost overnight. "Colonel" was an honorary flourish, but the industry Drake helped launch was entirely real and world-changing.

Dryden, TX

Aviation came early to remote Terrell County: in 1919 the U.S. government built an airfield near Sanderson for the 90th Aero Squadron, whose biplanes patrolled the Mexican border. When World War II demanded a chain of civilian and emergency military fields across the Southwest, American Airlines and federal aviation authorities built this landing field, finishing its two mile-long rock-asphalt runways in October 1943. Later renamed Terrell County Airport, it went on to host civil air patrol and military training.

Brownsville, PA · est. 1991

Spanning Dunlap's Creek along the National Road at Brownsville, this 80-foot cast-iron span was built between 1836 and 1839 as the first metal arch bridge in the United States. It replaced a string of earlier crossings on the site, including an 1809 Finley suspension bridge, and was fabricated under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with Capt. Richard Delafield and Lt. George W. Cass overseeing the work. It carried the young republic's great westward highway on a structure that pointed toward the age of iron.

Covington, KY

The broadcaster Durward Kirby was born in Covington in 1911 and spent his childhood on Greenup Street, attending St. Benedict School before his family moved to nearby Fort Thomas. He got his start at WLW radio, reporting on the devastating 1937 Ohio River flood and hosting big-band broadcasts from area nightclubs like the Lookout House. From those Cincinnati-area roots he rose to national fame in the early decades of television.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

This winding road from City Park up to Reading's landmark Pagoda takes its name from Charles E. Duryea, an automobile pioneer who used its slopes from 1900 to 1907 as a proving ground for his cars. Duryea built one of America's first successful gasoline automobiles, and the hill let him test the machines' power against the very grades that stymied early motorcars.

San Francisco, CA

This monument honors Eadweard James Muybridge (1830-1904), the pioneering photographer who, working in and around San Francisco, proved through rapid sequential photography that a galloping horse briefly lifts all four hooves off the ground. His motion studies laid the groundwork for the moving image, earning him the title "Father of Cinema." Muybridge's experiments in 1870s California bridged still photography and the birth of film.

Santa Clara County, CA

In 1878 and 1879, at Leland Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm — now the grounds of Stanford University — photographer Eadweard Muybridge solved a question that had eluded the eye: whether a galloping horse ever leaves the ground entirely. Using a battery of twenty-four cameras fitted with fast electric shutters, he captured animals in motion frame by frame. His sequential photographs laid crucial groundwork for the coming art of motion pictures.

El Paso, TX

Before pipes and pumps, El Pasoans drew water from open acequias and bought it from aguadores who carried it door to door. In 1882 Sylvester Watts built the city's first waterworks, pumping from the Rio Grande into a reservoir on this site, and later a riverside well became the main supply. The city bought the system in 1910 and modernized it, and in 1952 the Public Service Board took over its stewardship.

College Station, TX

In 1920 Texas A&M engineering students tried to broadcast a football game by ham radio, and when that failed they relayed updates by telephone to fans in a campus pavilion. The next year, students at wireless station 5XB rigged redundant transmitters and telegraph lines from the Kyle Field press box to send live play-by-play of the championship game against the University of Texas on November 24, 1921, using coded abbreviations to speed transmission. Missing the U.S. record by only days, the flawless broadcast is believed to have been the first of its kind in Texas.

Titusville, PA · est. 1954

In the hills around Titusville, the modern petroleum industry was quite literally being invented. The inscription marks where one of the region's earliest crude-oil refineries rose in 1860, just after Edwin Drake's famous 1859 well nearby, with its first run of refined oil following in 1861. It also nods to Samuel Kier, who had been distilling Pennsylvania crude in Pittsburgh years earlier, turning a nuisance seepage into lamp oil and medicine.

Jefferson, TX

What started in 1854 as a humble log blacksmith shop in Jefferson grew into a bell foundry under G. A. Kelly, casting the cowbells that clanged from the ox teams of pioneer freighters. The shop went on to make the Kelly plow, one of the first modern plows manufactured in Texas. It was an early spark of Texas industry in a place better known for river commerce.

Mount Joy Township, PA · est. 1947

Along this railroad right-of-way ran the first commercial telegraph line in the United States, strung between Lancaster and Harrisburg and completed in 1845 — barely a year after Samuel Morse's famous demonstration. The first message clattered through in January 1846 with a very human impatience: "Why don't you write, you rascals?" It was a small joke carrying an enormous idea — that words could now outrun the fastest horse.

Corsicana, TX

In 1902 the first public use of natural gas in Texas began on this Corsicana street, piping fuel to nearby homes and businesses. Navarro County became a cradle of the industry — the first gas meters appeared at Chatfield in 1905, and gas was first used to pump oil wells here in 1906. From these modest lines grew a network that within a generation spanned the state and, by the 1920s, launched the nation's first interstate natural gas pipelines.

Cecil County, MD

On May 30, 1947, an Eastern Air Lines flight bound down the East Coast went down near this stretch of the upper Chesapeake country, killing everyone aboard in one of the deadliest U.S. air disasters of its day. The crash came during the postwar boom, when commercial aviation was expanding faster than the safety rules meant to govern it. This quiet memorial marks the ground where that loss came to earth.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1996

Rising between 1822 and 1836 to John Haviland's dramatic radial design, Eastern State Penitentiary tried to reinvent punishment itself. Its "Pennsylvania System" isolated each prisoner in silence, pairing solitude with moral and vocational instruction in the belief that reflection could reform a soul. The experiment was studied and copied by more than 300 prisons around the world before the great fortress-like prison finally closed in 1971.

New Kensington, PA

New Kensington's Eddie Adams grew from a high school yearbook photographer into one of the most celebrated photojournalists of his time. His 1968 image "Saigon Execution" won the Pulitzer Prize and helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War. Over a career centered in New York, his work filled the nation's leading newspapers and magazines, earning him more than 500 awards.

San Marcos, TX

Jazz pioneer Eddie Durham was born in San Marcos in 1906 into a musical family and played trombone and guitar in bands across the Southwest before joining Kansas City's swing scene. Working with Bennie Moten and later Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie, he helped shape the big-band sound and pioneered the single-string guitar style — recording what is often called the first amplified guitar in 1935. A gifted arranger, he had a hand in standards including 'In the Mood.'

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1995

Born Salvatore Massaro in 1902, Eddie Lang grew up in this part of Philadelphia and grew into the musician often called the "Father of Jazz Guitar." A gifted soloist, he brought the guitar forward as a serious jazz voice, working alongside violinist Joe Venuti, bandleader Paul Whiteman, the Dorsey brothers, and others in the freewheeling music scene of the 1920s and early '30s. He was serving as Bing Crosby's accompanist when his sudden death in 1933 cut short a brilliant career.

Akron, OH

Before Thomas Edison married Mina Miller in 1886, he courted her at the Akron home of her father, the inventor and Chautauqua co-founder Lewis Miller. Local tradition holds that Edison — ever the electrician — erected a light pole on the premises during the courtship. It is a charming reminder that the world's most famous inventor was also a suitor who couldn't resist showing off his craft.