Thomas Edison is widely hailed as a genius, both as an inventor and as a businessman, and it was his vision that laid the groundwork for General Electric. In 1876 he opened his first real workshop in Menlo Park, where he set about exploring the possibilities of many different inventions he had seen at that year’s Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. This workshop would eventually yield arguably one of the most important inventions of the modern age: the electric light.