Menlo Park is an unincorporated community within Edison Township in Middlesex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. In 1876, Thomas Edison set up his home and research laboratory in Menlo Park, at the time an unsuccessful real estate development named after the town of Menlo Park, California. In this lab, which was one of the first to pursue practical, commercial applications of research, Edison invented the phonograph and developed a commercially viable incandescent light bulb filament.