Money Pit

Some five or six years ago I took up with builders, real estate men and manufacturing companies, the question of quantity production of cement houses, but nobody seemed to have any imagination and I became disgusted and quit.

–Thomas Edison, EDIS archives, E-19-13

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The history of efficient, cost-effective, housing in the United States gathered serious momentum in the 1880s with the first cast-concrete row houses erected in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shortly before, Thomas Edison, whose genius for the perpetual invention of epoch-altering technology, stumbled upon what he thought would be his next sure money maker—a colossal electromagnetic device designed to separate iron ore from rough quarried stone. While his New Jersey facility failed to isolate the desired metal, it did effectively crush limestone (an inadvertent by-product). This provided the raw material and inspiration for the Edison Portland Cement Company, founded in 1875. The following year Edison purchased a quarry in Oxford, New Jersey that would, ostensibly, make him millions.

By the early 1880s, Edison would become a constant advocate and innovator of the single pour concrete house. Edison would develop the means for the single-pour technique and by so doing—by working backwards, so to speak—he was hoping to position his cement company as the de facto supplier. In his West Orange factories and laboratories, he developed hundreds of patents for elements that would form low-income, single-dwelling cast-concrete housing—an idea that would take the next 40 years to gather momentum in the United States and Europe. Unwittingly, he provided the foundation for early 20th Century Modernism, an architectural typology that is hard to shake off.

By 1901 Edison would begin both applying and sharing technology aimed at universal solutions to the needs of affordable, durable, and ‘beautiful’ worker housing. Over the course of the next decade, his ideas would yield the basic grammar for a new, function-driven, form of dwelling. Apart from the interesting historical rewrite, what makes his work relevant today is the attempt to make corporate profits contingent on open-source technology—the first in building history. Edison’s pragmatism, arguably American, becomes a visionary architectural and social model.

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The object of my invention is to construct a building of a cement mixture by a single molding operation—all its parts, including the sides, roofs, partitions, bath tubs, floors, etc., being formed of an integral mass of a cement mixture. This invention is applicable to buildings of any sort, but I contemplate its use particularly for the construction of dwellings, in which the stairs, mantels, ornamental ceilings and other interior decorations and fixtures may all be formed in the same molding operation and integral with the house itself. The house thus made is practically indestructible and is perfectly sanitary. The cost of its construction is low and it is feasible to beautify such a house far beyond anything now possible in so cheap a manner.

Thomas Edison, 60 Patent serial no. 448,293, lines 9-26, 1908. 

The application did not receive an actual patent until 13 March 1917, 

No. 1,219,272.

 

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I only intend to build a sample house to start the ball rolling, without any idea of pecuniary benefits.

   —Thomas Edison, to developer Titus de Bobula, 1906