Built With Heart. Preserved by Community.

This village exists because of a fascination that began with reading and never stopped growing. Nabiha Yousuf fell for Thomas Edison the way so many of us do — on the page, in the story of a boy who sold newspapers on trains and grew up to light the world — and then she kept going: into the museums, into the archives, into the life of the Wizard of Menlo Park. Edison invented the phonograph; he and his collaborators developed practical incandescent lighting, an electric power system and early motion-picture technology. He received 1,093 U.S. patents. What began as curiosity became devotion.

While pursuing her second master's degree in Information Technology at Rutgers University, Nabiha Yousuf made Edison's world part of her studies — visiting the museums that held his work and reading everything she could find about how he imagined, tinkered, and built. During her GE career, she visited Thomas Edison National Historical Park. She has returned to him again and again through the movies and documentaries that keep the Wizard alive on screen — each one reminding her why she started. Standing where he stood, she saw what she had always believed: that creation is imagination with its sleeves rolled up.

Her admiration for Edison is not just for what he invented, but for how he worked: relentlessly, curiously, and with a willingness to learn from unsuccessful experiments. That spirit of trying, tinkering and believing is exactly what this village hopes to celebrate in every GE worker who ever picked up a wrench, filed a report, or taught a new hire.

Edison's work helped shape one branch of General Electric's origins; Thomson-Houston contributed another. For Nabiha, his workshop represents the power of imagination made practical. The lighting imagery in this village is a small tribute to that spirit. When you walk through this village, you're walking through his house of light.

In June 1884 a young engineer stepped off a boat in New York and walked into the Edison Machine Works carrying a letter from a mutual friend: "My dear Edison: I know two great men, and you are one of them. The other is this young man." The young man was Nikola Tesla. Edison hired him as an electrical engineer at a hundred dollars a month. Tesla worked there for about six months on electrical machinery, years before General Electric was formed.

Tesla later left the company. The circumstances of his departure remain disputed; in his own account, a promised reward turned out to be a joke. He patented a polyphase alternating-current motor in 1888 and contributed to the development of AC power systems. Edison Machine Works became part of Edison General Electric in 1889 — the company that merged with Thomson-Houston on April 15, 1892, to form General Electric. Tesla's name is stitched into the village's family tree whether or not he ever meant it to be.

Nabiha Yousuf refuses to turn this into a rivalry story. To her, Edison and Tesla are two halves of one lesson: Edison taught her that creation is imagination with its sleeves rolled up, and Tesla taught her that imagination doesn't always ask permission first. One man stayed and perfected. The other left and imagined ahead of his time. Tesla worked at a GE predecessor, not at the company formed in 1892. This village keeps a place at the table for every person who ever looked at the way things were done and quietly asked, "What if there's a better way?"