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Once upon a time, candles were simply hung on the branches of the Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of the Man-God.
Today we have come a long way from those times and decorations with colored lanterns it can even be turned into art.
Christmas without lights is not intended after all and tree decoration is now a family tradition. Far from the times when it was a great effort to adapt such small candle holders to fir, that is, with the help of molten wax.
Which, of course, was very dangerous, so they always had a bucket of water near the Christmas tree.
That is why some inventors tried from an early age to find ways to make the personalized safe, placing pins and latches on the candles.
Despite the dangers, of course, the candles in Christmas tree it prevailed as a custom long before the early 20th century. Especially since the “Illustrated London News” magazine published the photo of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with their children around a shiny fir tree.
The story of the Christmas lights, however, has only one invisible hero …
A born businessman
It was in 1882 in a New York home that Edward Hibberd Johnson had a brilliant idea. An idea that would make him the main Christmas decorator.
Your faithful partner and companion Thomas edison it was also the inventor’s word. A true miracle worker who embodied the ideals of science and business at the same time.
The two men met in 1871, on a happy occasion in human history. That year Johnson hired Edison, then 24, as a consultant for the Automatic Telegraph Company.
The young inventor “ate in his office and slept in a chair,” as Johnson recalled, “in six weeks he had finished the books, written a series of summaries, and performed two thousand experiments.” And he found a solution. “
Johnson was so impressed with his young assistant that when Edison quit to start his own company, he followed him. Johnson was the man who benefited from the inventions of his former assistant.
When, for example, Edison invented it phonographJohnson was the one who traveled the world with the device, sparking the world’s interest.
And when Edison patented the light bulb in 1880, it was again Johnson who supported him widely in co-founding the Edison Electric Light Company.
As a vice president of the company, Johnson had seen the Christmas trees that adorned the White House for years, beginning in 1856, and considered the lighted candleholders from the branches to be extremely dangerous for use in Kosmakis homes.
But it was they who transformed the simple fir tree into a Christmas tree. Johnson, a resourceful businessman that he was, saw another business opportunity here.
So one day while he was in Edison’s workshop, on December 22, 1882, he saw his partner’s lamps with another eye.
He immediately returned home, on his famous Fifth Avenue. Manhattanand he placed a Christmas tree near the large window on the street, decorating it with 80 colored lanterns, red, blue and white lights.
The wire with the lanterns wrapped it around the tree and the tree itself put it on a rotating base. All of them worked with a power generator. And then he called a reporter.
“At the back of the beautiful room, there was a large Christmas tree with a more picturesque and strange look,” he wrote. “WA Croffut was one of its historians. Detroit “Post Office and Tribune”.
“It was beautifully decorated with 80 lamps. You could hardly imagine anything more beautiful.” The spectacle put on by Johnson fascinated people, who came to see the burning tree with their own eyes.
Next step: turn “magic” into a tradition. And he did it by simply doing more each year.
An article in the New York Times, for example, in 1884 tells us that his tree was adorned with 120 lanterns.
How they were established
Still, Johnson’s flashlights were far ahead of their time. And the same was very expensive and electricity was not yet as widespread as the two partners would like.
A cable with 16 of those flashlights cost about $ 12 in 1884 (about $ 350 at current prices). The moment Johnson had been waiting for came in 1895, when the twenty-second president of the United States, Grover Cleveland, decorated his tree. White House with Johnson lights.
Since the turn of the new century, it was hard to see a store in the US that didn’t even have a few of those lanterns prominently displayed during the holidays. They were still too expensive for people to put in their homes.
However, in a few years, until 1914 in particular, a 15-foot wire with Christmas lights would cost no more than $ 1.75. Before long, until the early 1930s, colorful Christmas lights could be seen everywhere.
Edison went down in history as inventor of the light bulb and his partner as the father of the electric Christmas tree.
Small omissions
Edison himself, of course, played a role in the story of the Christmas tree with electric lanterns. Of course, he had completely gotten rid of the fir tree and was simply decorating his famous Menlo Park, NJ workshop with lanterns.
And he did it in the hopes of impressing mayors and eventually agreeing to a contract for electrification from Manhattan. It is not ruled out that his partner’s electric tree played exactly the same advertising role.
Edison had not patented his light bulb until a few years earlier. It was a new story for everyone.
A story he made known at the first public demonstration of the incandescent lamp (December 31, 1879), when he emphatically stated: “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will light candles.”
The fact that in 1882 only one Detroit newspaper wrote about the Johnson tree shows that the press completely ignored the incident.
But not the world. What Johnson did, after all, was replace the bulbs with a cord with 80 bulky pear-shaped bulbs. It didn’t exactly revolutionize its field.
People were impressed by magic, but they did not intend to imitate it at home. After all, we are in the years when most people didn’t even trust the electricity craze. How much more than the Christmas craze that Johnson was to establish was abandoned by the average house.
We had to get to the 1920s to convince the Edison Electric Light Company (which would become General Power) to lower the prices of holiday lights, a move that would have taken them by surprise in the US and Western markets.
It is also important for our story to mention that people considered light bulbs to be safer than electric flashlights. President Cleveland’s Christmas tree made a significant contribution here.
The 100 colored lanterns brought by the White House fir tree would change many citizens’ feelings about electricity overnight.
And if all you have to do today is plug in the flashlights, in those years it was a real bummer to mount an “electric Christmas tree”, as they called it.
You had to rent a generator and hire an electrician to connect the lights to the wire. You need about $ 300 for a powered one. fir tree, about $ 2,000 in ordinary money.
Only the elite could have it and only she had it …
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