A small crowd gathered on a wooden platform in the middle of a dirt field to celebrate one of the world’s most prolific inventors. The weather was unseasonably cold and blustery for late September in Dearborn, Michigan, but the group, dressed in hats and coats, waited patiently through dusty gusts of wind. A Ford Model A slowed to the side of the platform, and out stepped Thomas Edison, spade in hand.

Ignoring the handrails, Edison bounded up the platform's steps at a pace uncommon for an 81-year-old suffering from a cold. Smiling, he strode past the crowd and pressed the spade into a block of wet cement. Taking care to leave footprints in the drying block, Edison stepped down to join Henry Ford and with a typical Edison flourish, signed his name in the cement along with the date, September 27, 1928.

The spade had belonged to a friend, famed botanist and horticulturalist Luther Burbank, who brought the world hundreds of new plant varieties. Similarly, Edison introduced hundreds of his own technological inventions to the world. Together, Burbank's spade and the cement block signed by Edison represented the union of agriculture and industry, two pillars of American innovation. This unity formed the cornerstone of Henry Ford's new museum, an institution devoted to documenting America's story.

On that late September day, Ford dedicated the new museum to (and named it after) his hero and friend Thomas Edison, the person that he believed best represented America's innovative spirit. Ironically, Edison’s name became synonymous with success not only in spite of, but because of, his many failures.

In late 1879, Thomas Edison successfully tested an incandescent lamp that lasted long enough to be commercially profitable, but only after experimenting with thousands of materials to find an effective filament. Early on, platinum filaments had proved promising. Edison, knowing that he would need to secure large quantities of the metal if he was to sell his incandescent lamp at a reasonable price, immersed himself in literature on geology, mining, and mineral processing. 

Although platinum filaments didn’t end up working out, mining captured Edison’s curiosity and his interest expanded from platinum to gold ore. While developing society-transforming innovations like electric light and electrical distribution, Edison also organized the Edison Ore-Milling Company and filed a patent for an electromagnetic ore separator, an invention that extracted magnetic metal ore from pulverized rock.

For much of the 1880s, Thomas Edison focused on commercializing electric light, installing electrical systems and power stations to support his electricity customers. However, in 1892, Edison's business partners merged his electric company with a rival's, leaving him with only stock. The new company dropped Edison’s name from the title, finalizing his exit from the electrical industry. Afterwards, Edison told a colleague: "I'm going to do something now so different and so much bigger than anything I've ever done before people will forget that my name ever was connected with anything electrical."

By the time of the merger, Edison's focus was shifting. He had relied heavily on iron, and the steel that it produced, for his electrical enterprises. In the late nineteenth century, the eastern iron ore mines of the United States were becoming quickly depleted. High-grade ore from a few Midwestern mines remained too expensive to transport and mining low-grade ore proved economically unfeasible – leaving the eastern steel and iron industries faltering.

In the iron ore shortage, Edison saw a way to economize the mining of low-grade ore with his electromagnetic ore separator. He launched a new company, filed for new ore separator patents, and scaled up experiments in ore processing plants. Eventually Edison acquired an old iron ore mine in northern New Jersey that still contained large quantities of low-grade ore. In 1890, he designed and built a plant near the mine in an attempt to turn that low-grade ore into a profitable product.

At the new plant, Edison implemented a cutting edge, automated process. An enormous steam shovel loaded mined boulders into carts, which carried them to a steel conveyor belt leading to the top of a tall building. Inside, the rocks dropped through multiple sets of massive rollers, which crushed them into a fine, sand-like powder. Carried by conveyor belt to another tower, the powder fell past hundreds of electromagnets that pulled granules of iron to one side while waste sand fell on the other. The concentrated iron ore powder could then be sold and shipped to eastern steel mills.

Edison soon ran into setbacks with his ore concentrating process. Massive rollers broke loose, abrasive dust covered everything, and several workmen died in machinery accidents. Some ore powder blew away during transport to the steel mills; still more blew away in steel mill furnaces. With his interest in the electrical industry behind him, Edison turned his full attention to problem-solving at the plant. One successful development, a glue-like substance that bound the iron powder in briquettes, allowed his iron ore to be transported and used effectively in steelmaking.

From 1894 to 1897, Edison spent nearly all his time tinkering at the plant, only coming home on Sundays. Despite modest demand for the ore he was producing, Edison frequently shut down the plant to redesign machinery and rebuild inefficient structures. As Edison sank more money into his now-failing project, investors left, workers lost faith, and foremen resigned. To keep his plant running, Edison sold the stock from his electric company merger and went into debt. The final blow came with the opening of the Mesabi iron range in the Midwest. High-grade iron ore became plentiful again, leaving Edison's iron ore powder unneeded.

By the end of the 1890s, Thomas Edison had spent nearly ten years and more than two million dollars attempting to build an industry around the mining of low-grade iron ore. Deeply in debt, Edison shuttered his operations, but in true Edison fashion, saw new opportunity rise from the dust of his failed mining venture.

Cement had been used for centuries, but in the early 1800s, a British stonemason named Joseph Aspdin devised a recipe of carefully proportioned ingredients to make a stronger and more durable version, which he called Portland. By the late nineteenth century, as people found new uses for the material, U.S. demand for Portland cement grew. Thomas Edison's initial exposure to the industry began with selling waste sand from his ore separator to cement manufacturers. When his mining operations failed, Edison saw an opportunity for his rock crushing technology to be used in the growing cement industry and founded the Edison Portland Cement Company.

By 1907, Edison had constructed another plant in northern New Jersey. His new company was on its way to becoming America’s largest cement producer, partially due to Edison's redesign of the rotatory kilns used in cement-making. Edison's kilns operated so efficiently, they set new industry standards and ultimately led to the overproduction of cement, making it unprofitable.  

Hoping to drive demand, Edison explored new uses for the building material. One grand experiment attempted to solve the shortage of affordable housing for working class families. Using giant iron molds, Edison created entire houses of cement at the rate of one per day. Ultimately, mass-producing houses with Edison's process proved too expensive for builders to adopt. However, the Edison Portland Cement Company eventually profited from the general expansion of cement use in infrastructure, and Edison was able to repay the debt incurred from his ore mining ventures.

On that windy day in late September, 1928, Henry Ford cast a block of Portland cement at the future site of the museum he dedicated to Thomas Edison. The cement cornerstone -- made with blast-furnace slag, a stony waste material separated out of metal during the ore refining process — represented more than Edison’s technological contributions. The cornerstone embodied Edison's life-long relationship with failure and success, from electric lighting to ore mining to Portland cement. The very cement that shaped the block not only captured Edison's signature, but also his defining characteristic: the ability to turn failure into opportunity.