Children at the private school held in the Farm Bureau building keeping time with homemade musical instruments with a phonograph. Pie Town, New Mexico

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who is best known for his work in the field of electricity. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. He is credited with the development of many important devices and technologies, including the light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera. Edison was a highly successful and influential inventor, with more than 1,000 patents to his name. He was also a pioneering entrepreneur, founding companies such as General Electric and the Edison Electric Light Company. "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

Pie Town, New Mexico, is a town with a population of about two hundred that’s named for its famous baked goods. Pie Town photographs, along with 164,000 others taken by F.S.A. photographers, are now stored at the Library of Congress. Russell Lee’s made his photographs in 1940, while on assignment for the Farm Security Administration. Lee, who had trained as a chemist and then as a painter, was assigned to take pictures “of most anything he can find.” He made six hundred images that give a look at the daily life of a small desert community. Many photographs are color Kodachromes. It was the time of the Great Depression when lower commodity prices crippled domestic prosperity and price declines destroyed the purchasing power of farmers and other primary producers.