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Lighting the Christmas Tree

By Dan Harshman

We recently acquired an Edison Fireside Phonograph Model “B” —a possible subject for a future newsletter. While looking into its history I discovered information about another early innovation from the Edison General Electric Company that I thought was more appropriate for our December newsletter.

Other than the challenge of untangling the lights every year, lighting our holiday tree is a pretty simple job these days. The only real hard part is getting the whole family to agree on whether it will be all white lights or multi-colored lights this year. And don’t get me started about the trees that constantly change colors these days. They take me back to the 1960s when a neighbor of my parents had an aluminum tree with a spinning color wheel shining on it to get a similar effect.

What we take for granted today with our Christmas tree is actually one of the oldest of all Christmas traditions. As early as the sixteenth century people in Germany brought trees into their homes at this time of year and decorated them.

A popular story is that Martin Luther created the first lighted Christmas tree by attaching candles to the limbs of a fir tree. He is said to have been trying to re-create the sight of stars gleaming through a grove of evergreen trees for his family.

While Germany embraced this custom, it didn’t come to America until the 1830s when a professor at Harvard attached candles to the family Christmas tree. Attaching candles to a tree is not easy and obviously, fire and a live tree is never a good match, especially when they are together in your living room. 

In 1882 a business partner of Thomas Edison, Edward Johnson, decided to come up with a safer way to light the family Christmas tree. He wired together 80 red, white and blue light bulbs and placed them on the tree. He also decided to add another unique feature by placing the tree on a revolving wood box. 

Although his creation was viewed by reporters visiting his home in Manhattan in 1882, it didn’t see commercial production until 1903. At that time the newly formed General Electric Company began advertising the first strings of pre-wired colored lights for Christmas trees. The ads promised “No danger, smoke or smell.”

These early lights had a feature that I’m sure many of us remember cussing at years ago. They were wired so that if one bulb burned out the entire string of lights went out. I can remember sitting with my dad as a kid searching for that one bad light before we could get to the fun part of decorating the tree. Sitting there screwing bulbs in and out hoping the next one was the one you were looking for was frustrating, and it was even more fun to locate a bad bulb after the whole tree was completely decorated. It took a few decades for this problem to be corrected by a new way of wiring the strands of lights to eliminate the search for the elusive one bad bulb.

Like all new products, there were those that didn’t quite trust these new General Electric strands of lights. This led GE to even develop a rental program for the lights.

An advertisement for the “Electric Lighting Outfit” for the Christmas tree and house decoration shows a price of $12 for 28 one-candle power miniature Edison lamps. Now remember that this was 1903; the average annual salary was around $300 and that $12 would be worth $429.96 in today’s money. It would be interesting to know how many of these new-fangled Christmas lights were actually sold.

General Electric dominated the Christmas light market until the late 1940s with their Mazda brand of lights. After World War II the industry expanded, and Christmas lights became available in more colors, shapes and sizes. Lights became less expensive, and customers saw more variety. As more homes became electrified, the market continued to expand. 

One variation that appeared in 1946 was the bubble light. These were candle shaped lights that contained methylene chloride, which when heated by the light would cause bubbles to rise in the liquid encased within the candle. I can remember seeing these on my grandparent’s Christmas tree and being fascinated by them as a kid. 

Over the years we have seen my infamous aluminum Christmas tree lighted by a flood light behind a revolving color disc, the creation of miniature lights, soft white lights, lighted artificial icicles, the newer LED lights and even a retro light that is much like the old GE Mazda bulbs. The use of lights has expanded from just the living room tree to outside on trees and shrubs and outlining the entire house. The recent use of computerized presentations with lights set to music is all the rage now as neighborhoods try to outdo each other with the creation of extravagant displays.

We will be taking the simple warm white bulb, red bows, and green garland approach again this year at the Edinburg Mill; stop by and check it out. From all of us to all of you; we wish you a Merry Christmas and all the best of this Holiday Season.