Florida, Day 7

 Thursday, February 10

Jane and I drove into Fort Myers to the Edison and Ford Winter Estates. Admission was $25, which seemed expensive to me, but I don’t get out much. The museum and gardens had been featured on Samantha Brown’s Places to Love, and since I hadn’t been there before, it seemed like a good thing to do. Jan wasn’t interested and stayed home to prepare for a meeting she had the next day.

The parking lot was lined with magnificent banyan trees. It was a warm day; the shade felt nice.

A row of banyans by the parking lot

A huge staghorn fern hung from one of them.

Huge potted staghorn fern hanging from a banyan tree

The oldest banyan on the grounds was up by the museum building. A sign explained that part of Edisons research was to find a substitute for rubber during World War I. The banyans were part of that research, although the most promising lead he had was goldenrod, of all things. Did I even know it had milky sap? Maybe. Anyway, the banyans remain.

The oldest banyan on the property, and one of the largest in the world

Thomas Edison’s favorite invention was the phonograph. This is a picture of the phonograph display in the museum.

Various models of Edison's phonograph

There was also a room devoted to the AC/DC squabble Edison had with Tesla, which Edison ultimately lost because DC can’t be easily transmitted over long distance. I have read elsewhere that Tesla though Edison was a schmuck because he didn’t like “book learning” and was therefore slower than he might have been developing new technologies. He had to create everything from first principles instead of looking things up like a normal person, at least in Tesla’s opinion.

As a child, I remember seeing Edison’s lab in Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI. I assumed it was because Edison was from around there, but I learned my mistake. Henry Ford and Edison were close friends. Ford moved Edison’s lab from Menlo Park, NJ to Greenfield Village. The lab on the Fort Myers estate is where Edison did the rubber substitute research.

We walked across the street to where Edison and Ford had their summer homes side by side. The Edison home had a lovely wrap-around porch and was situated to make best use of breeze from the Caloosahatchee River.

The Edison winter home

The Ford home was predictably modest. Terry and I watched a biography of Ford that suggested that he liked to make money more than spend it.

The Ford winter home

I posed with a statue of Henry that was by the Ford house.

Henry and me

And as long as I’d done that, I posed by Tom under the oldest banyan on our way back to the car.

Tom and me

We still had some time before happy hour on the lanai, so we drove to Cape Coral to look for owls. Two years ago, Cape Coral was a total bust. We looked all over for owls, finally finding them all the way down on Marco Island. On this day, however, we found an owl at the very first nest we checked.

The first owl

We drove down a street that had grass and trees down the middle. There were many wooden crosses that marked nests as served as owl perches as well as lengths of PVC pipe that marked the “stay out!” areas around the nests. By golly, the next hole had an owl.

The second owl

So did the third one! It was all very exciting. When I took a close look at the pictures later, I noticed that one owl had yellow eyes and another had dark eyes with flecks of color.

The third owl

I did some Googling and found an article that said the yellow eyes were normal and that the dark eyes were a rare recessive. I suspect that the person writing the article did not realize that “rare” (a form of a gene that occurs at low frequency) and “recessive” (a form of a gene that is only expressed if there are two copies of it) are different things. In any case, it was cool to think we’d seen something uncommon. It will be interesting to see if the trait spreads over time. Something to look forward to next year!