Thomas Edison and his family had a ritual.

Every winter, they would leave freezing cold New Jersey and head down to Fort Myers, Florida.

Back then, Fort Myers was out there. Think swamps and mosquitoes. It was actually easier to get around by boat than overland.

The Edison's would do vacation stuff, go fishing, go on boat rides, collect interesting plants.

And in 1914, they invited a different branch of American inventing royalty to join them.

That year, Henry Ford, like of the Model T Ford, came down to Florida with his wife, Clara.

Ford must have been psyched because Edison was actually his hero.

They'd met briefly years before at a conference when Ford was still a low-level employee at an Edison company.

Now they were meeting on something like equal terms.

So to celebrate the occasion, Ford had some Model T's shipped down to Fort Myers.

Everyone went out joyriding around the swamps.

The cars flooded, their campsite got soaked.

Clara Ford was really afraid of snakes, and there were snakes everywhere.

Henry tried to scare them away by shooting off a pistol.

Needless to say, it was a trip.

But soon, once the smoke from Ford's pistol had cleared and the model T's had dried out,

Edison and Ford would become more than just travel buddies.

They were actually about to embark on an enormous inventing project,

a project that would turn Edison's Florida house into a full-fledged botanical laboratory and would become the last

great obsession of Edison's life.

I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today's episode is brought to you in partnership with Fort Myers, Islands, beaches, and neighborhoods.

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