An inventive New Yorker finds a brilliant application for electric lights and becomes the first person to use them as Christmas tree decorations.
Edward H. Johnson, who toiled for Thomas Edison’s Illumination Company, used eighty small red, white, and blue electric bulbs, strung together along a single power cord, to light the Christmas tree in his New York home. Edison himself may have strung electric lights as Christmas decorations around his lab in 1880. But sticking them on the tree was Johnson’s idea. It was a mere three years after Edison had demonstrated that lightbulbs were practical at all (see here).
The idea of replacing the Christmas tree’s traditional wax candles (customary since the mid-seventeenth century) with electric lights didn’t, umm, catch fire right away. Stringed lights were mass-produced as early as 1890, enjoying a vogue with the wealthy and in shopwindows, but they didn’t become popular in humbler homes until a couple of decades into the twentieth century.
In 1895, President Grover Cleveland supposedly ordered the family’s White House tree festooned with multicolored electric lights. General Electric began selling Christmas-light kits in 1903.
Another New Yorker is generally credited with popularizing indoor electric Christmas lights. According to the story, Albert Sadacca, whose family sold ornamental novelties, became a believer in 1917 after reading the account of a bad fire caused by a candlelit tree bursting into flames. Whether or not that’s the reason, Sadacca began selling colored Christmas lights through the family business. More homes were wired for electricity, so the timing was right, and sales took off.
With his brothers, Sadacca later started a company devoted solely to the manufacture of electric Christmas lights. He roped some competitors into a trade association, which then dominated the Christmas-light industry until the 1960s.—TL