"O Christmas Tree"
Thanks to the Father of Electric Christmas Tree Lights, the Season Got A LOT Brighter and Safer
When I was a child, decorating our family Christmas tree always felt a bit like a science fair project —and I hated science fair. Before we could get to the fun, artsy part of decorating with all the fancy, sparkly ornaments and piling on the tinsel, the electric lights had to be untangled and strung. Back then, string lights were series-wired. One loose or burned out bulb meant the entire string stayed dark.
In keeping with the gendered division of labor of those days, stringing the lights fell to my dad to do — note aforementioned science fair analogy. Daddy wasn’t much for cursing but as the minutes spent searching for that one bum bulb invariably stretched into an hour, mumbled words of blasphemy escaped. Once the problem bulb was located and replaced and the #$#&%! lights strung, a Budweiser was popped open.
Today, we can’t imagine Christmas without electric lights but of course that wasn’t always so. The Christmas tree, a German tradition that found its way to Great Britain and later the United States, was originally decorated with dried fruits, flowers, little presents, ribbon, glass ornaments1 and… ((wait for it)) candles!2
Once electricity came on the scene, the new, pricey technology was reserved for practical purposes like street lighting more so than for ornamentation. Most people continued to light their homes with gas. Only the ultra rich could afford to have their mansions wired for electricity, let alone Christmas trees.
During the Christmas season of 1880, Thomas Edison created the first strand of electric Christmas lights and hung them outside his Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratory as a sort of ad billboard for train passengers traveling by.3 (I wrote about Edison in two previous posts: the Hollywood Sign and Evelyn Nesbit and the Trial of the Century).
It was Edward Hibberd Johnson (1846-1917), Edison’s mentor and later President of The Edison Company for Electric Lighting, who came up with the idea of using electricity to safely illuminate our Christmas trees. On December 22, 1882, Johnson hand-wired eighty red, white, and blue walnut-sized light bulbs and strung them together around a tree in front of the street-side window of his home at 139 E. 36th Street in Murray Hill, Manhattan.4 A generator powered the lights and the tree’s revolving pedestal.5
The spectacle was widely reported on, and Johnson made the display an annual tradition, every year adding more bulbs to the tree. In 1884, he expanded to 120 bulbs, according to The New York Times. The trend took off. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland placed multi-colored electric lights on the White House Christmas tree but because of the expense of electricity — wiring electric lights cost about $300, approximately $2,000 today, and required the service of an electrician — most family Christmas trees stayed dark.6
In 1903, General Electric began to offer affordable, pre-assembled kits of Christmas string lights.7 As they say, the rest is history!
To all who celebrate, I wish you and yours a safe and happy, peaceful and prosperous Christmas!
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The first written record of glass Christmas tree balls dates back to 1848 Germany. https://www.balsamhill.com/inspiration/best-european-glass-ornaments
Ibid
https://www.eei.org/en/delivering-the-future/articles/who-invented-electric-christmas-lights
“A Brilliant Christmas Tree; How An Electrician Amused His Children,” The New York Times. December 27, 1884. p. 5.
https://www.eei.org/en/delivering-the-future/articles/who-invented-electric-christmas-lights
Ibid.
Ibid.
Fascinating history of the Christmas tree lights.
Merry Christmas!