First Electric Christmas Tree Lights
The first known electrically illuminated Christmas tree was the creation of Edward H. Johnson. While he was Vice-President of the Edison Electric Light Company, he had Christmas tree bulbs especially made for him. He proudly displayed his Christmas tree — hand-wired with 80 red, white, and blue electric light bulbs the size of walnuts — on December 22, 1882, at his home in New York City. The story was reported in the Detroit Post and Tribune by a reporter named Croffut. Croffut wrote "Last evening I walked over beyond Fifth Avenue and called at the residence of Edward H. Johnson, vice-president of Edison’s electric company". Although Johnson's address at that time is not known, he lived in one of the first areas of New York City wired for electric service. Edward H. Johnson became known as the Father of Electric Christmas Tree Lights.
From that point on, electrically illuminated Christmas trees, indoors and outdoors, grew with mounting enthusiasm in the United States and elsewhere. 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 nine sockets by the Edison General Electric Company of Harrison, New Jersey and advertised in the December 1901 issue of the Ladies' Home Journal. Each socket took a miniature two-candela carbon-filament lamp.
Read more about this topic: Edward Hibberd Johnson
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