Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were good friends in their later years. 188.5610

The first evidence of the test tube appears in a May 1951 inventory of hundreds of personal and historical items transferred to Henry Ford Museum from Henry Ford’s Fair Lane residence after his wife Clara’s death in September 1950. Among the items was a “glass case containing Mr. Thomas Edison’s hat, shoes, and sealed test tube containing (?).”

No more was heard about the test tube until 1978, when it was discovered in its cardboard mailing tube along with the hat and shoes under one of the display cases in an exhibit entitled, “Henry Ford—A Personal History,” that had been installed in Henry Ford Museum in 1953. Some, but not all, of the museum staff involved remember a note tied to the cardboard tube stating, “This is the test tube you requested from my father’s bedroom.” No such note has been found in the museum’s archives. Still, the test tube and cardboard mailing tube went on display with the following label:

Edison’s Last Breath?
It is alleged that Henry Ford asked Thomas A. Edison’s son, Charles, to collect an exhaled breath from the lungs of Ford’s dying hero and friend. The test tube was found at Ford’s Fair Lane mansion, along with Edison’s hat and shoes, after Clara Ford’s death in 1950.

In the late 1980s, the museum acquired a photocopy of a letter from Charles A. Edison, the inventor’s son, to prominent national radio commentator Walter Winchell. The whereabouts of the original are unknown. Dated June 27, 1953, the letter reads:

During Mr. Edison’s last illness there was a rack of eight empty test tubes close to his bedside. They were from his work bench in the Chemical Room at the Laboratory in West Orange. Though he is mainly remembered for his work in electrical fields, his real love was chemistry. It is not strange, but symbolic, that those test tubes were close to him at the end. Immediately after his passing I asked Dr. Hubert S. Howe, his attending physician, to seal them with paraffin. He did. Later I gave one of them to Mr. Ford.

It seems not out of character for Charles to have asked that those test tubes be sealed as memorials. Neither Charles nor Henry Ford is known to have referred to the test tubes as the great man’s “last breath.” That embellishment was left to others.

As Harvey Rachlin has written in his book Lucy’s Bones, Sacred Stones, and Einstein’s Brain, “Historical artifacts make physically manifest the dreams and ideas, the great deeds and events, of human history. They symbolize the glorious triumphs of human endeavor, its humiliating defeats and just about everything in between. Steeped in legend, artifacts forge an indelible link with the past.”

Or, as a woman visitor told the Wall Street Journal in 2003 after seeing the test tube on display, “It connects me to Edison’s life. It makes me realize that he was a living person who breathed.”

William S. Pretzer
Curator

Copyright © 2014 The Henry Ford The Henry Ford is an AAM accredited institution. The complex is an independent, non-profit, educational institution not affiliated with the Ford Motor Company or the Ford Foundation.