The laboratory complex comprises the industrial facility built by Edison in 1887 to research and develop his inventions.

The complex includes more than a dozen buildings that supported Edison's research into electricity, photography, motion pictures, chemistry, metallurgy and other disciplines.

[4] Edison's Black Maria was the world's first movie studio, and the building could be rotated on a turntable to keep sunlight on film subjects.

The mansion was built with gravity-convection central heat, indoor flush toilets, and hot and cold piped water.

Pedder was found to have embezzled funds from his employer to build Glenmont, and was forced to surrender the estate, which Edison bought in 1886 for $125,000 (equal to $4,238,889 today), moving in with his newly married second wife Mina and his three children from his first marriage.