The year was 1885. Thomas’ first wife, Mary, had died the previous year, and he had three children at home. Thomas was smitten with Mina, noting in his diary that he might have to take out an accident policy because he was “thinking about Mina and came near [to] being run over by a street car.” Still, he remained smooth enough to flirt in Morse code, even proposing by tapping out the question.
By the time the Edisons settled into their new home in 1886 (purchased at half price and fully furnished because it had been confiscated from an embezzler), Thomas had already established his reputation as the “wizard of Menlo Park.” As Mina, startled by her sudden celebrity status, wrote to her mother from her Florida honeymoon, “People stare at us so.”
Being “Mrs. Thomas A. Edison” was a lot of work. Mina had to manage the public entertainments peculiar to technological royalty, including putting up with Henry Ford and panicking when the king of Siam asked for iced tea. She also had to fulfill all the domestic duties expected of a wife. The 20-year-old was suddenly in charge of a giant house and three stepchildren: Marion, Thomas Jr. and William. (Her children with Thomas—Madeleine, Charles and Theodore—would follow over the next 12 years.) It didn’t help that Mina had a hard time winning over 13-year-old Marion, who thought the “Ohio girl” “too young to be a mother to [her] but too old to be a chum.”
Mina leaned on her own mother and sisters for support. “I know there [are] many things demanded of you,” wrote her sister Jennie Miller in 1886, “but you are strong and have character enough to stand way above them. … I know of no one who could do better.” Even when Mina struggled under pressure, her family never saw her as a “whiner,” says great-grandson David Sloane, who remembers meeting her at the very end of her life. “She had a job that was larger than human-sized.”
Over the course of her marriage, the young woman once perceived as the “simple, quiet wife of a great and successful man” (to steal a never-quite-accurate description of Mina from the Ladies’ Home Journal) transformed into a confident public figure who called herself a “home executive” and promoted domestic labor as a matter of national importance.