New Jersey's first residents were the Lenni Lenape Indians who inhabited the territory for over 10,000 years before the first European arrived on its shores. Other tribes, including the Powhatan-Renape, also lived here.
The first European to explore New Jersey was Giovanni de Verrazano, from Florence, Italy, who sailed along the Jersey coast and anchored off Sandy Hook in 1524. Nearly a century later, in 1609, Henry Hudson arrived and New Netherland, a Dutch colony, was established in 1624 in what was then called 'the northeast territory’.
In 1638, a Swedish colony settled along the Delaware River and was taken over by the Dutch in 1655. In 1664, the area fell to the British. King Charles II granted domain to his brother James Duke of York, who granted the land between the Delaware and Hudson to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret. They named the land New Jersey, after the Isle of Jersey, in the English Channel. The land was later sold to Quakers, who divided it into East and West Jersey. In 1702, the rights to both Jerseys were surrendered to the English Crown, who united the inhabitants under a royal governor. The governor of New York also served as the governor of New Jersey until 1738, when Lewis Morris became governor of New Jersey. More than 100 battles took place on New Jersey soil during the Revolutionary War. In 1776, Washington crossed the Delaware and surprised and defeated the Hessian garrison at Trenton. A few days after the new year, he defeated a British force at Princeton. His army spent the winter of that year and the 1779-80 winter in Morristown.
New Jersey was the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution in 1787 and the first to ratify the Bill of Rights in 1789.

1847-1931: He opened his own laboratory in Newark, N.J., where he made important improvements in telegraphy and on the typewriter, and invented the carbon transmitter that made Alexander Graham Bell's telephone practical. In 1876 he moved his laboratory to Menlo Park, N.J., where he invented the first phonograph (1877) and the prototype of the commercially practical incandescent electric light bulb (1879). These and other inventions led to his being internationally known as "the wizard of Menlo Park", although in 1887 he moved to a larger laboratory in West Orange, N.J. By the late 1880s he was contributing to the development of motion pictures, and by 1912 he was experimenting with talking pictures.

912-88: Cartoonist, born in Westfield, NJ. He was a regular contributor to The New Yorker from 1935 onwards, specializing in macabre humour and a ghoulish group which was immortalized on television in the 1960s as The Addams Family.