NJNew Jersey Famous People

In 1876 Thomas Edison bought land at Menlo Park, then a nearly empty stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad in Raritan Township, and built something no one had built before: a laboratory whose product was inventions on a schedule. The phonograph came out of it in 1877 and a workable incandescent lamp in 1879. Edison finished with 1,093 US patents in his own name, moved the operation to West Orange in 1887, and put up the Black Maria there in 1893, a tar-paper shed on a turntable that was the first film studio in the world. New Jersey's contribution to American life has often looked like that: the workshop rather than the stage.

One president born here, one who governed here first

Grover Cleveland was born on 18 March 1837 in the Presbyterian manse at Caldwell where his father was minister, and the family moved to New York State when he was four. He is the only president elected to two terms that did not touch, serving from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897, which is why he is counted twice in the numbering as the twenty-second and twenty-fourth president. He retired to Princeton and died there in 1908.

Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, so he does not count as a New Jersey native, but he ran Princeton University from 1902 to 1910 and the state from 1911 to 1913, and went from the governor's office straight to the White House. Aaron Burr, born in Newark in 1756, was vice president under Jefferson and shot Alexander Hamilton in Weehawken in 1804, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson because duelling law there was laxer.

The laboratory that heard the Big Bang

Bell Labs put its research campuses in Murray Hill and Holmdel, and the results are hard to overstate. Karl Jansky, working with a rotating antenna at Holmdel in 1932, traced a persistent hiss to the centre of the Milky Way and invented radio astronomy by accident. In December 1947 John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley demonstrated the first working transistor at Murray Hill. In 1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, using a horn antenna at Holmdel, spent months cleaning pigeon droppings out of it before accepting that the noise they could not remove was radiation left over from the birth of the universe, which won them the 1978 Nobel Prize.

Albert Einstein spent the last two decades of his life on Mercer Street in Princeton, arriving in 1933 and dying there in 1955. Buzz Aldrin, born in Montclair on 20 January 1930, flew Gemini 12 and then followed Neil Armstrong onto the lunar surface in July 1969. His mother's maiden name was Marion Moon.

Hoboken, Newark, Freehold

Frank Sinatra was born at home in a Hoboken tenement on 12 December 1915, an only child delivered with forceps that scarred his cheek and ear for life. Bruce Springsteen was born in Long Branch in 1949 and raised in Freehold, and worked the Asbury Park bar circuit around the Stone Pony before Born to Run in 1975. Whitney Houston was born in Newark in 1963 to the gospel singer Cissy Houston, sang at New Hope Baptist Church as a child, and was a first cousin of Dionne Warwick of East Orange.

Count Basie was born in Red Bank in 1904 and Sarah Vaughan in Newark in 1924, both into a state that had working jazz rooms long before it had highways. Frankie Valli, born Francesco Castelluccio in Newark in 1934, and the Four Seasons came out of Belleville. Queen Latifah was born Dana Owens in Newark in 1970, Lauryn Hill grew up in South Orange, and Jon Bon Jovi was born in Perth Amboy in 1962 and raised in Sayreville.

Paul Robeson, Alice Paul, and the Newark writers

Paul Robeson was born in Princeton on 9 April 1898, the son of a man who had escaped slavery in North Carolina and become a minister. He was the third Black student ever admitted to Rutgers, twice an All-American in football, and valedictorian of the class of 1919, then took a Columbia law degree and became the most famous bass voice in the world. The State Department revoked his passport from 1950 to 1958 over his politics and he lost most of a career to it. Alice Paul, born at Paulsdale in Mount Laurel in 1885, led the White House pickets of 1917 and wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923.

Philip Roth was born in Newark's Weequahic section in 1933 and set most of a fifty-year body of work within a few miles of the house, winning the Pulitzer in 1998 for American Pastoral. Stephen Crane was born in Newark in 1871 and wrote The Red Badge of Courage without having seen a battle. Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark in 1926 and raised in Paterson, the city that William Carlos Williams, a Rutherford doctor who wrote between appointments, turned into a book-length poem. Amiri Baraka was born in Newark in 1934 and Judy Blume in Elizabeth in 1938.

Screen actors and one general

Meryl Streep grew up in Bernardsville after being born in Summit in 1949. Jack Nicholson was born in Neptune City in 1937 and raised believing his grandmother was his mother and his mother his sister, a fact he learned from a magazine researcher in 1974. Danny DeVito was born in Neptune Township in 1944 and Michael Douglas in New Brunswick the same year. John Travolta was born in Englewood in 1954. Kevin Smith, born in Red Bank in 1970, shot Clerks overnight in the Leonardo convenience store where he worked days. Shaquille O'Neal was born in Newark in 1972. Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the coalition in the 1991 Gulf War, was born in Trenton in 1934 to the founding superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, the officer who ran the Lindbergh kidnapping investigation.

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