How Christmas Tree Lights Evolved from Major to Mild Fire Hazard

Before our Christmas tree lighting needs were taken guardianship of with $ 25 and a trip to Target , creating the atm signify placing candles — wax tower topped with fire — onto seasonal kindling . cogitate it ’s frightening now when your dog tug a leg ? Just imagine your living room burst into flames for the sake of Christmas cheer .

Luckily , holiday partizan did n’t blow much time transforming the invention of the light bulb in 1979 into a holiday decoration . In fact , Edison himself string the first circle of electrical lights in 1880 when he festoon his New Jersey laboratory that December . Two years later , a colleague bring the idea to the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree . While a partner at the Edison Illumination Company , Edward H. Johnson decided the fire peril holiday tradition needed an upgrade . So he hand - telegraph a cosmic string and circled it around his own tannenbaum . If that was n’t telling enough , just three years after the incandescent lightbulb was forge , he also made the tree diagram spin on a box like a lit ballerina .

Here ’s an account of the show in the Detroit Post and Tribune :

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There were eighty lights in all encased in these kickshaw ice egg , and about equally divided between bloodless , red and blue . As the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree turn , the color alternated , all the lamps going out and being relit at every gyration . The result was a continuous flash of dancing colour , red , white , blue , ashen , blood-red , blue-blooded — all even . I need not tell you that the twinkle evergreen was a fairly peck — one can hardly think anything pretty .

Cool powerful ? The problem was that electrical energy was not yet ubiquitous , and people were freaked out about bring in it into the home plate . Johnson ’s melodic theme did n’t make a splash until after 1895 , when vacation - jazz Pres Grover Cleveland asked that the White House sept tree diagram be covered with hundreds of multi - biased lights . The request gave the electrically - lit tree diagram some cred .

slow but certainly , however , holiday specs come forth beyond the homes of discoverer and full-bodied the great unwashed . Large storehouse began erecting light - covered Christmas trees for public showing around 1900 .

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General Electric took the tinge , and by Christmas 1903 , the company offer pre - assembled kits of 8 , 16 , and 24 atomic number 6 - fibril spark . The 24 - light kit be $ 12 — the fair weekly wage at the time . The lights add up in exonerated , red , white-livered , blue , and green . Those with color were hired man - dipped in ink .

So the lights were on the shelf , but they still needed an advocate to promote more average to corrupt them . Enter Albert Sadacca , who was born into a freshness light company family clientele . As a teen in 1917 he suggest they stock string of lights for the holidays . By the 1920 ’s , Sadacca launched the NOMA Electric Company , which specialize in the December - theme strings . People purchase his lights , and up until 1965 , his company was the humankind ’s biggest Christmas Light purveyor .

This year’snational Christmas Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in Washington D.C.was fit with 65 hardening of programmable light-emitting diode lights provide by General Electric — the society Edison founded in 1890 . Although the long - time Christmas tree was rap down by a wind storm last twelvemonth ( do n’t concern , they supersede it ) , at least we know this one wo n’t be consume by a decoration - induced fire .

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