Website Gizmodo today has a piece that will amuse lighting aficionados. It tells the history of Christmas lights as we know them today, tracing their evolution back to an 1880 marketing stunt, when Thomas Edison strung incandescent lighting all around his Menlo Park laboratory compound. Electric lighting for Christmas trees was born two years later, courtesy of Edison associate Edward Johnson.
They’re right, the story is strangely interesting, and includes a reproduction of the first ad for Christmas tree lights, from Scientific American magazine in 1900.
Doug Chandler began writing about the electrical industry in 1992, and still finds there's never a shortage of stories to be told. So he spends his days finding them and telling them. Educationally, he's a Jayhawk with an English degree. Outside of work, he can often be found banging drums or harvesting tomatoes.
