Once upon a time, candles were simply hung on the branches of the Christmas tree to celebrate the birth of the Godman.
Today we have come a long way from those times and decorations with colorful lanterns can even be turned into art.
Christmas without lights is not meant after all and the decoration of the tree is now a family tradition. Very far from the times when it was a great effort to adapt such small candelabra to the fir, that is, with the help of melted wax.
Which, of course, was very dangerous, so they always kept a bucket of water near the Christmas tree.
That is why some inventors tried from a very early age to find ways to make the custom safe, by attaching pins and catches to the candles.
Despite the dangers of course, the candles in Christmas tree prevailed as a custom long before the beginning of the 20th century. Especially since the "Illustrated London News" magazine published the photo of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with their children around a bright fir tree.
The story with the Christmas lights, however, has only one invisible hero…
It was in 1882 in a New York house that one Edward Hibberd Johnson would have a brilliant idea. An idea that would turn him into the main Christmas decorator.
His loyal partner and companion Thomas Edison was also the word of the inventor. A real miracle worker and one who embodied at the same time the ideals of science and business.
The two men met in 1871, on a happy occasion in the history of mankind. 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, "within six weeks he had finished the books, written a series of abstracts, and done two thousand experiments." And he found a solution. "
Johnson was so impressed with his young assistant that when Edison resigned to start his own company, he followed him. Johnson was the man who made the ingenious inventions of his former assistant profitable.
When, for example, Edison invented it phonograph, Johnson was the one who traveled the world with the device, arousing the interest of the world.
And when Edison patented the light bulb in 1880, it was again Johnson who backed him richly to co-found the Edison Electric Light Company.
As vice president of the company, Johnson had for years seen the Christmas trees that adorned the White House, beginning in 1856, and considered the lit candlesticks of the branches extremely dangerous for use in Kosmakis's homes.
But they were the ones who transformed the simple fir tree into a Christmas tree. Johnson, a resourceful businessman as 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 a different eye.
He returned immediately to his home, on his famous 5th Avenue Manhattan, and set up a Christmas tree near the large street window, decorating it with 80 colorful 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 were powered by a power generator. And then he called a journalist.
"At the back of the beautiful hall was a large Christmas tree with a more graphic and bizarre aspect," he wrote. Detroit "Post and Tribune."
"It was beautifully decorated with 80 lamps. One could hardly imagine anything more beautiful." The show set up by Johnson fascinated the people, who came there to see with their own eyes the burning tree.
Next step: to turn the "magic" into a tradition. And he did it just by doing more every year.
An article in the New York Times, for example, in 1884 tells us that his tree was adorned with 120 lanterns.
Even so, Johnson's lanterns 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 such lanterns cost about $ 1884 in 12 (about $ 350 at current prices). The time Johnson had been waiting for came in 1895, when the 22nd President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, decorated his tree. White House with Johnson lights.
From the beginning of the new century, it is difficult to see a store in the US not having even a few such lanterns in a prominent place during the holidays. They were still too expensive for people to put in their homes.
Within a few years, however, until 1914 in particular, a five-meter cord with Christmas lights would cost no more than $ 1,75. In a short time, until the early 1930s, you could see the colorful Christmas lights everywhere.
Edison went down in history as inventor of the light bulb and his partner as the father of the electric Christmas tree.
Edison himself, of course, played a role in the history of the Christmas tree with electric lanterns. Of course, he had completely got rid of the fir tree and was simply decorating his famous workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, with lanterns.
And he did so hoping to impress the mayors and finally agree on a contract for electrification of Manhattan. It is not ruled out that his partner's electric tree performed 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 Johnson's tree shows that the press completely ignored the incident.
But not the world. What Johnson did, after all, is replace the candelabra with a wire with 80 bulky, pear-shaped bulbs. It did not exactly revolutionize his field.
People were impressed by the magic, but they did not intend to imitate it at home. After all, we are in the years when most people did not even trust the madness of electricity. How much more so that the Christmas fashion that Johnson was going to establish was abandoned for the average house.
We had to get to the 1920s to convince the Edison Electric Light Company (which would become General Electric) to drop prices on Christmas lanterns, a move that would have taken them by surprise in the US and Western markets.
It is also important for our history to mention that people considered light bulbs safer than electric lanterns. President Cleveland's Christmas tree made a significant contribution here.
The 100 colorful lanterns brought by the White House fir would change the feelings of many citizens about electricity overnight.
And if all you have to do today is plug in the lanterns, in those years it was a real nuisance to set up an "electric Christmas tree", as they called it.
You had to rent a generator and hire an electrician to connect the lights to the cable. You need about $ 300 for one lit. fir, about $ 2.000 in current money.
Only the elite could have it and only she had it…