The first electrically lit Christmas tree in history revolved. It had eighty hand-wired bulbs in red, white and blue, stood in a Manhattan parlour window in December 1882, and was built by a man whose job was, essentially, marketing electricity.
Edward Johnson’s window display
Edward H. Johnson was a long-time associate of Thomas Edison and vice-president of the Edison company whose Pearl Street station — the first commercial power plant in America — had switched on that same September. That Christmas, Johnson hand-wired eighty coloured bulbs “about as large as an English walnut” onto a tree at his New York home and set the whole thing revolving. A reporter from the Detroit Post & Tribune described it on 22 December 1882, and Guinness World Records lists it as the first electric Christmas tree. It was, among other things, a superb advertisement for domestic electricity — the tree as sales demo.
Source: Guinness World Records and Library of Congress
From fire hazard to fairy lights
What Johnson’s bulbs replaced was open flame: the German tradition the Victorians adopted decorated trees with lit candles, an arrangement exactly as safe as it sounds. Electric lights took decades to become affordable — early strings cost a workman’s wages — but they turned the lit tree from a supervised risk into the default, and every string of fairy lights since is a descendant of that revolving Manhattan demo.
The lights eventually reached the knitwear
A hundred and thirty years on, the same idea arrived on the jumper — battery pack instead of Pearl Street, but the same instinct: if it glows, people look at it. What goes wrong when clothing runs on batteries is lovingly documented in six things that go wrong with light-up Christmas jumpers.
The full Light-Up & Sparkle collection is Johnson’s true legacy.