Germans began decorating Christmas trees with candles as far back as the 1700s, but people wouldn"t begin stringing trees with electric lights until the late 1800s. Thomas Edison created the first practical incandescent lights and used them to decorate his Menlo Park laboratory for Christmas in 1880. Then three years later, the vice president of Edison"s company, Edward H. Johnson, had Christmas tree bulbs especially made, which he used to decorate the tree in his New York City home. Nevertheless, electric lights didn’t catch on as a holiday decoration among the general public until 1895, when President Grover Cleveland asked that the White House Christmas tree be illuminated by hundreds of multicolored electric bulbs.
Merry and bright
Today in History
More Desktop Wallpapers:
-
World Wildlife Conservation Day
-
Get on your bike and ride
-
Roman bridge of Córdoba, Spain
-
Birds of the Drömling
-
With leaves this tasty, who cares about a view?
-
Art and soul
-
National Public Lands Day
-
Happy Mother s Day
-
World Rainforest Day
-
Breckenridge, Colorado
-
Everyone s watching the Perseids
-
Rock of ages
-
Combating extinction with citizen science
-
A palace for the public
-
Invisible no longer
-
Black History Month
-
On the lookout for Sheep-Cote Clod
-
Zelenci Nature Reserve, Slovenia
-
Winterpret on ice
-
Silvereyes in South Korea
-
Vinh Hy Bay, Vietnam
-
Hidden beauty in Thailand
-
Terraced rice fields, Yuanyang County, China
-
Cousins Day
-
A glittering diamond in the rough
-
Corfe gets creepy
-
Under Parisian skies
-
Hallstatt, Austria
-
Snow buntings take flight
-
An enduring vision