Thomas Edison’s Concrete Furniture
While Thomas Edison did not invent cement, his Portland Cement Company created buildings, roads, dams, and even the original Yankee Stadium.
Edison’s concrete designs extended into residential construction, patenting a method for mass-producing concrete houses using molds creating exterior and interior walls, roofs, bathtubs, floors, and stairs.
He also patented concrete furniture, including bedroom sets, pianos, and his beloved phonograph. The Portland Cement Company went bankrupt, concrete furnishings were not stylish and were extremely heavy. They did, however, make their way into the Clypeate’s headquarters. Most notably, the massive clock tower occupying the center of the Library of the Ages, and the concrete cabinet ALVA uses to extract information from Declan, although there are certainly more concrete pieces in Nancy’s Place.
Scientific American, January 1912
“Mr. Thomas A. Edison has conceived the idea of building furniture of concrete, for use in his concrete houses, the advantage of concrete furniture lying in its cheapness. He has already built a sample piece of furniture. The cost of this cabinet is but $10. In order to test the ability of this piece of furniture to stand the rough handling of freight men, he recently sent the furniture to Chicago and back.”
Yankee Stadium
Cement house being poured
Cement cabinets