Visitors during the past 70 years to Thomas A. Edison’s winter estate in Fort Myers would routinely glance into the research lab, peer across a collection of beakers, tubes and assorted Edisonia, and move on.

Now, after six years of intensive research, the wood-clad cottage on the east side of McGregor Boulevard that served as the national nexus for research into a sustainable domestic source of natural rubber is being officially recognized by the American Chemical Society as a National Historic Chemical Landmark (the first such location in Florida).

The national landmark designation and rubber research has inspired a new, permanent, interactive exhibit, “Edison and Rubber: A Scientific Quest” at the Estates that will give visitors a more comprehensive, hands-on insight into the work when it opens in October. It will include several activities that incorporate polymer, acetone breakdown, plant rubbings and more.

“It’s yet one more thing we can do to, one more step to becoming the science educational facility that we are so people walk away with an understanding that rubber was made out of a plant,” said Alison Giesen, chief curator at Edison & Ford Winter Estates. “It’s exciting to be able to learn in a fun environment that’s not intimidating, while engaging with the subject matter. I love history and the arts, but science has a special place for discovering you. People of all ages discover things about themselves when they engage in science.”

What happened in Edison’s lab—from his practical approaches to recycling chemicals to methodologies still used today to patents earned—means that “it wasn’t just Edison tinkering, as people used to believe,” Giesen said.

Indeed, Edison’s quest for a domestic rubber source became an obsession that consumed the last four years of his life. Instead of relying on Southeast Asian and South American imports, he desired a fast-growing and easy-to-harvest source of American rubber — an important industrial resource that could have been disrupted by the vagaries of politics, nature, economics — or, in particular, war.

This emergency-focused passion was an offshoot of Edison’s appointment to the Naval Consulting Board to coordinate scientific and technological research in preparation for World War I. It also was spurred by his popular and successful phonograph and storage-battery enterprises, which, among other inventions and factory processes, required large quantities of rubber.

Applying his lifelong passion for chemistry, Edison teamed with his industrialist friends/collaborators whose consumer products were also heavily reliant on rubber: automobile magnate Henry Ford and tire giant Harvey Firestone. (Firestone became heavily invested in Liberia, while Ford lost millions in two expansive Brazilian rubber tree plantations because of blight. For his part, Edison consistently stated publicly that he was not in it for profit but for preparedness.)

In 1927, the trio established the Edison Botanic Research Corp. in Fort Myers to analyze more than 17,000 plant samples from around the world for their latex content. After searching high and low, Edison set his sights on Solidago, commonly known as goldenrod, for growing, testing and hybridization. One variety was named in his honor, Solidago Edisoniania.

The work done led to widespread effects in other fields, said Pearce Augustenborg, Estates education coordinator. “It touched off a Renaissance in American food production, and touched a lot of other areas.”

The botanical research was instrumental in the passage of the Plant Patent Act in 1930 because intellectuals and governmental officials realized that “patenting needed to go beyond mechanical processes,” said Estates CEO and president Chris Pendleton.

So it was here, on his fertile 14-acre plot along the Caloosahatchee, that they erected slat houses for growing plants, and sowed gardens with hundreds of vines, shrubs and herbs. Edison built a machine shop to create custom instruments that were devised for special tasks; set up seed banks, seed grinders and plant crushers; installed vacuum extractors and solvent recyclers; and got to work.

“Almost everything in the lab is still used today in some form or another,” said Richard Wallace, Armstrong Atlantic State University chemistry professor, who has been a major consultant on the Estates lab. “The list includes filtration flasks, Buchner funnels, test tubes, mortars and pestles, Erlenmeyer flasks, beakers, condensers, Soxhlet extraction glassware, analytical balances, funnels, ovens and lots more.”

Edison wasn’t a newcomer to plant research; he’d already done work with bamboo in perfecting his light bulb filament. The lab he did that work on in Fort Myers was moved to Ford’s Greenfield Village for its “museum qualities” in 1928. From Fort Myers, the Edison Botanic Research Corp. established a vast connection of formal and informal networks with Edison’s other laboratories, New York Botanical Garden, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and amateur and professional botanists and chemists — any venue that could bolster his research and development.

The research into rubber was so pivotal that additional American Chemical Society celebrations will be held this year at other present-day locations of his laboratories in West Orange, N.J., and the Henry Ford Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich.

“We’re not just an elegant winter home for a robber baron,” Pendleton said. “This is what defines us and makes us a national, scientific landmark.”

• What: Edison Botanical Research Laboratory National Historic Chemical Landmark Celebration, featuring guest speaker Ingrid Montes, chemistry professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras in San Juan and director-at-large of the American Chemical Society, a half-hour Wild Wizards show, hands-on science activities and tours of the newly restored lab.

• Where: Edison & Ford Winter Estates, 2350 McGregor Blvd.

• When: 2-4 p.m. Sunday, May 25

• Details: 334-7419 or edisonfordwinterestates.org