Vintage Christmas Lights

Christmas tree lighting dates to 18th-century Germany, when wax was melted to tree branches to hold candles to illuminate specific ornaments. The Christmas tree, however, didn't become a widespread tradition until the early 19th century, growing in popularity in the United Kingdom and the United States between the 1840s and 1870s. Not surprisingly, the lit candles on the trees proved to be a fire hazard. Thomas Edison patented the light bulb in 1880, long before most of the United States had access to electrical power. To show off his invention, Edison hung strands of light bulbs outside his Menlo Park Laboratory in New Jersey. For Christmas 1882, Edison's partner Edward Johnson, then the vice president of Edison Electric Light Company, put together a string of 80 red, white, and blue light bulbs and hung them on a tree on a revolving pedestal. Johnson's display, in the window of a Manhattan townhouse, caused quite a stir, leading to national press coverage and an annual tradition for Johnson, who hung 120 bulbs on his tree in 1884. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland requested that the White House Christmas tree be adorned with hundreds of red, white, and blue Christmas lights. By 1900, one could buy a string of 16 lights for $12 ($350 today). They were mostly purchased by merchants, like department stores, who used electrically lit Christmas trees to incite customers to gaze at their holiday window displays. General Electric began to offer kits for electric Christmas tree lights, which would run a family $2,000 in today's dollars and required the help of an electrician to install. By the 1910s, strings of Christmas lights were much cheaper (about $42 in today's money for 16 feet), but many Americans were still nervous about electric power. Around 1916, companies licensed to use Edison's tungsten-filament MAZDA lamp technology—including GE, Westinghouse, and National—began to apply it to their Christmas lights. Around 1919, GE switched from globe-shaped bulbs to flame- or cone-shaped bulbs. In 1917, a teenager named Albert Sadacca, whose family owned a novelty lighting company, is said to have suggested that his family's business start offering colorful strands of Christmas lights. In 1925, Sadacca and his brothers founded the trade association, National Outfit Manufacturers Association (NOMA), which evolved into NOMA Electric Company. At the time, roughly 85 percent of American homes were wired for electricity, and in 1922, Underwriter's Laboratories had published a set of safety standards for Christmas lights. The 1920s was also the decade when blinking Christmas lights were first available to Americans. GE introduced the C9 outdoor bulb in 1927, which made outdoor Christmas displays safer. In the early 1930s, GE's research campus in East Cleveland, Ohio—called Nela Park ("Nela" stands for "National Electric Lamp Association")—began putting on dazzling and elaborate outdoor holiday light displays. At the same time, GE started offering how-to guides for building figures and 3-D structures to light up with their outdoor strands. Outdoor lighting at home, however, didn't really take off until the postwar period, when more Americans were living in suburbs. In 1935, Carl Otis invented bubble lights, which are candle-shaped vials of colored liquid heated up by incandescent bulbs, for indoor use. NOMA introduced these lava-lamp-like Christmas lights to the United States as "Bubble Lites" in 1946. Over the years, vintage Christmas lights have been made into the shapes of fruit, flowers, and Christmas figures like Santa using the same molds that small glass ornaments were blown with. NOMA also made several safety developments over the years including all-rubber cords (1940) and fused safety plugs (1951). In 1966, GE introduced the inexpensive Merry Midget lights, the miniature, icicle-shaped, indoor Christmas lights that were tremendously popular and still dominate the Christmas tree-lighting market today. That same year, NOMA filed for bankruptcy.