At the time, automobile tires were made from real rubber, imported from Africa. One company had a monopoly on the shipments, so Firestone and Ford asked Edison to come up with something they could make in the United States.

Edison was trying to perfect a rubber-like substance made of goldenrods when he died in 1931. As it turned out, others went on to develop artificial rubber, made of purely chemical compounds.

Thomas Edison’s banyan tree looks like something out of a scary movie. (Carol M. Highsmith)

So you won’t see big electrical sparks at Edison’s laboratory in Florida.

But you will see evidence of that goldenrod research and, just outside the door, a huge banyan tree, as big as a house. Harvey Firestone brought what is now a massive tangle of trunk and branches and roots to Edison from Calcutta, India, in 1925.

Thomas Edison came to love plants - the goldenrods, the banyan, and palm trees. He gave tiny Fort Myers hundreds of palm saplings to plant along the main road. Today they form a beautiful canopy for which Fort Myers is famous.