Christmas lights History
The Christmas tree was
adopted in upper-class homes in 18th-century
Germany, where it was occasionally decorated withcandles, which at the
time was a comparatively expensive light source. Candles for the tree were
glued with melted wax to a tree branch or attached by pins. Around 1890,
candleholders were first used for Christmas candles. Between 1902 and
1914, smalllanterns and glass
balls to hold the candles started to be used. Early electric Christmas
lights were introduced with electrification,
beginning in the 1880s.
The illuminated Christmas tree became established in the United Kingdom
during Queen Victoria's reign,
and through emigration spread to North America and Australia. In her
journal for Christmas Eve 1832, the delighted 13-year-old princess wrote,
"After dinner.. we then went into the drawing-room near the dining-room.
There were two large round tables on which were placed two trees hung
with lights and sugar ornaments. All thepresents being
placed round the trees". Until
the availability of inexpensive electrical power in the early twentieth
century, miniature candles were commonly (and in some cultures still are)
used.
In the United Kingdom, electrically powered Christmas lights are generally
known as fairy lights. In 1881,
the Savoy Theatre, London was
the first building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. Sir
Joseph Swan, inventor of the incandescent
light bulb, supplied about 1,200 Swan incandescent lamps, and a year
later, the Savoy owner Richard
D'Oyly Carte equipped the
principal fairies with miniature lighting supplied by the Swan United
Electric Lamp Company, for the opening night of the Gilbert
and Sullivan opera Iolanthe on
25th November 1882. The term
fairy lights for a string of electrically powered christmas lights has
been in common usage in the UK ever since.
The first known electrically illuminated Christmas tree was the creation
of Edward H. Johnson, an
associate of inventor Thomas
Edison. While he was vice president of the Edison
Electric Light Company, a predecessor of today's Con
Edison electric utility, he had
Christmas tree light bulbs especially made for him. He proudly displayed
his Christmas tree, which was hand-wired with
80 red, white and blue electric incandescent
light bulbs the size of
walnuts, on December 22, 1882 at his home on Fifth Avenue in New
York City. Local newspapers ignored the story, seeing it as a publicity
stunt. However, it was published by a Detroitnewspaper
reporter, and Johnson has become widely regarded as the Father
of Electric Christmas Tree Lights. By 1900, businesses started stringing
up Christmas lights behind their windows. Christmas
lights were too expensive for the average person; as such, electric
Christmas lights did not become the majority replacement for candles until
1930.
In 1895, U.S. President Grover
Cleveland proudly sponsored the
first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White
House. It was a huge specimen, featuring more than a hundred multicolored
lights. The first commercially produced Christmas tree lamps were
manufactured in strings of multiples of eight sockets by theGeneral
Electric Co. of Harrison,
New Jersey. Each socket took a miniature two-candela carbon-filament
lamp.
From that point on, electrically illuminated Christmas trees, but only
indoors, grew with mounting enthusiasm in the United States and elsewhere. San
Diegoin 1904 and Appleton, WI in
1909, and New York City in
1912 were the first recorded instances of the use of Christmas lights
outside. McAdenville North
Carolina claims to have been the first in 1956. The Library
of Congress credits the town
for inventing "the tradition of decorating evergreen trees with Christmas
lights dates back to 1956 when the McAdenville Men's Club conceived of the
idea of decorating a few trees around the McAdenville Community Center." However,
the Rockefeller Center
Christmas Tree has had "lights"
since 1931, but did not have real electric lights until 1956.Furthermore,
Philadelphia's Christmas Light Show and Disney's Christmas Tree also began
in 1956.Though General Electric sponsored
community lighting competitions during the 1920s, it would take until the
mid 1950s for the use of such lights to be adopted by average households.
Over a period of time, strings
of Christmas lights found their way into use in places other than
Christmas trees. Soon, strings of lights adorned mantles and doorways
inside homes, and ran along the rafters, roof lines, and porch railings of
homes and businesses. In recent times, many city skyscrapers are decorated
with long mostly-vertical strings of a common theme, and are activated
simultaneously in Grand
Illumination ceremonies.
In the mid 2000s, the video of the home of Carson
Williams was widely distributed
on the internet as a viral
video. It garnered national attention in 2005 from The Today Show on NBC, Inside
Edition and the CBS Evening
News and was featured in a Miller television commercial. Williams
turned his hobby into a commercial venture, and was commissioned to scale
up his vision to a scale of 250,000 lights at a Denver shopping center, as
well as displays in parks and zoos.
