Incredible Holiday Light Displays Around the World

On a late December evening in 1880, Thomas Edison wanted to impress some city officials visiting his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He had been working on making incandescent light bulbs more practical and longer-lasting, so he hung a double row of 290 lamps outside. The “soft and mellow light” was “beautiful to look upon” and “brilliant,” The New York Times reported. The timing was right, but it was a few more years before electricity would be firmly associated with the holiday season. Edison’s colleague and close friend Edward H. Johnson was the first to use it to illuminate his Christmas tree (and also to make it rotate). He assembled 80 red, white, and blue light bulbs together and wound the lights around his revolving display. The press reported it as “the handsomest Christmas tree in the United States.”