The history of the Christmas tree garland. Who created electric Christmas garlands

A long time ago, lovers of noisy holidays could only light the Christmas tree with Christmas candles. But in 1882, Edward Hibberd Johnson invented the New Year's garland, and in doing so, not only brought the holiday to a new level, but also saved many lives.

How it all started

That year, 36-year-old Edward Johnson, like all residents of his native New York, was busy decorating the room and the New Year tree on the eve of the holiday. But this time, he decided to slightly improve the lighting technology using electricity, which was then gaining popularity in Manhattan.

Almost 3 years have passed since Thomas Edison introduced the first light bulb, but not everyone was as familiar with it as Johnson, who worked with him in Menlo Park. He hired the 24-year-old Edison when he worked for the Automatic Telegraph Company in 1871, but the new employee was so brilliant that the roles soon reversed, and the boss became a subordinate of the famous inventor. Johnson became vice president of the Edison Electric Light Company and lead power generation engineer. He soon presented his first work with light bulbs to the people of Manhattan.

Now, on Christmas Eve, the creator was preparing to go down in history. Ever since Martin Luther King, Jr., who planted in our minds the idea of ​​bringing down the stars from the heavens to make them sparkle among the trees, people have been decorating New Year's trees with wax candles. It looked beautiful and romantic, but it was definitely extremely dangerous. Every year with the advent of the New Year, magazines wrote about hundreds of tragic cases when the tree was suddenly engulfed in fire, burning houses to the ground, and sometimes their inhabitants.

The Secret of the New Year's Miracle

By replacing candles with electric bulbs, Johnson not only saved people from the risk of burning out in a fire, but also brought elegant multi-colored flicker into the picture of the holiday. A reporter from the Detroit Post and Tribune who visited Edison's neighbor wrote about 80 iridescent red, white and blue lights, no larger than a walnut, decorating the inventor's Christmas tree. The remaining 28 bulbs flickered on two garlands located under the ceiling.

Breakthrough!

This was a real New Year's revolution! The lights were lit in turn with an interval of 10 seconds, which created a picture of "dancing stars". Electrical current was fed from the office where Addison worked to a lever in his house, which caused the garland to turn on. “I must admit, it was an incredible sight! the reporter wrote. “There is hardly anything that can be so beautiful.”

A garland is a long chain consisting of homogeneous objects. It can be paper figures, balls, flowers, small lights. Such decorations make a New Year or Christmas tree simply chic. The tradition of using garlands is very ancient.

In the Roman Empire, flower garlands decorated the streets where celebrations took place. Most often, roses were used for these purposes. To this day, echoes of Roman traditions have come down as mistletoe garlands, which are popular in Catholic countries.

December coniferous wreaths with candles first appeared in Germany. Pre-Christian Germans decorated the windows of their houses with such living lights. Later, wreaths "migrated" to the front doors. Today, this decoration is as popular as Christmas trees.

The main colors of Christmas garlands are green, gold and red. The first symbolizes living foliage, which will soon adorn all trees. Gold color is a way to bring wealth into the house. But the red color has a very subtle meaning. It symbolizes the blood of Christ. During the existence of the USSR, residents of the countries that were part of it saw communist symbols in the red lights of garlands. In those days, the red five-pointed stars replaced the blue Bethlehem luminaries with seven rays on the Christmas tree tops.

Fashionable in Soviet times, garlands of candy wrappers, vanilla dryers, apples and tangerines are again at the peak of popularity today.

Garlands can be made independently from sweets and paper. Creative people create very beautiful chinoiserie or art deco lanterns. These Chinese New Year decorations are not only very effective, but also useful: they drive away negative energy and attract positive energy. There are many types of paper lamps. The most beautiful can be called sky lanterns - Hum Loy and Hum Fey. They are made from heat resistant material. A burner is placed inside these lanterns. Then the wicks are set on fire and the flashlight is released into the sky. As a result, entire constellations-garlands appear in the sky.

Christmas trees in pre-revolutionary Russia were decorated with many wax candles. Burning lights created a special festive atmosphere, but they were a source of increased fire danger. Therefore, with the advent of electric garlands, candles ceased to be Christmas decorations.

Modern LED and fiber optic garlands differ significantly from their electrical predecessors, invented back in 1882 by Edward Johnson. They are more reliable, functional and elegant. Such decorations can be used in the cold and even in the water.

But the most interesting invention of our time is the garlands of waterfalls. They are installed in the form of aqua panels and are beautiful, environmentally friendly and healthy decorative elements.

The Christmas tree garland, an indispensable attribute of the New Year and Christmas holidays, celebrates its anniversary on December 22. Multi-colored light bulbs on a cord, giving a sense of mystery and magic, first lit up 130 years ago. Their creator, the American Edward Jones, was a student of the most prolific inventor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Thomas Alva Edison.

The tradition of decorating the main characters of the winter holidays with toys, sweets and lights - big fir trees - appeared long before the invention of Edward Jones. Previously, the owners installed candles on the sprawling branches of festive trees, screwing them with wires. It was a very risky undertaking, given that the needles have the ability to flare up rapidly. In order to avoid tragedies, the owners put a bucket of water next to the Christmas tree in advance, which helped to put out the flame from the candles in time. Because of this, our ancestors could not enjoy the magical moments, when beautiful lights lit up the Christmas tree decorated with sweets and decorated with sweets. Typically candles were lit for a short period on Christmas Eve itself and then extinguished.

Whatever fixtures for candles people invented so that they could be placed at the very tips of branches, away from the trunk, thereby avoiding fire, but spruce trees still burned with enviable constancy. The first opportunity to avoid fire hazardous situations appeared only at the end of the 19th century. Shortly before the original replacement for wax candles, Thomas Edison, a world-famous entrepreneur and innovator, invented the electric lamp. She laid the foundation for the garland, which was born three years later.

On December 22, 1882, Edison's smart assistant Edward Jones thought of decorating a Christmas tree with incandescent lamps. The first New Year's tree, twinkling with eighty small lamps of red, blue and blue, appeared in New York at Edward's house. However, the extravaganza did not happen. The Christmas tree garland suffered the fate of most of the inventions of mankind - it was not appreciated and ignored by everyone, including representatives of the media, whom the inventor invited to his home specifically to show off his work. However, uninspired by the spectacle, the journalists decided that in such a ridiculous way, Edward Jones advertised the electric company of Thomas Edison. Without noticing the appearance of the world's first electric garland, members of American society went home to set fire to their Christmas trees, and many of them - in the truest sense of the word.

Only one person stayed at Edward's house - a reporter for a Detroit newspaper. And despite the fact that history has not preserved the name of this journalist, he can be considered the "godfather" of the Christmas tree electric garland. Thanks to the pen of this man, the whole world learned about the invention of the American. However, there is another story of Edward's invention, which is distinguished by the absence of heroes. According to an alternative version, only one journalist came to the presentation of the first garland at the house of Edison's assistant, but he also remained indifferent and, dejectedly batting his eyes, went home.

Be that as it may, the garland of multi-colored lamps was really not remembered for more than a decade. The main starting point for the popularity of New Year and Christmas garlands can be considered 1895, when a huge festive fir tree in front of the White House in Washington shone with multi-colored electric lights. The innovation was immediately picked up by the Finns, and in 1906, on the streets of Finland on Christmas Eve, fir trees decorated with electric garlands began to appear. The invention of Edward Jones not only freed mankind from the risk of fire on a festive night, but also made it possible to illuminate street spruce trees with magic lights, on which it was pointless to install candles, since their wicks went out when the wind was blowing. The garlands managed to bring the feeling of a holiday from houses and apartments to the streets, as a result of which such a concept as the spirit of Christmas appeared, with which the air in cities is saturated on the eve of the winter holidays. And without which it is difficult to imagine Western culture.

As for our country, electric garlands appeared on the shelves of Soviet Russia during the period of totalitarianism. The first Christmas tree garlands were put into production only in 1938, because they had previously been subjected to ideological persecution. The year was 1916, the world was engulfed by the First World War, when the wrath of the Holy Synod fell upon the New Year's trees, which considered the holiday trees a "German custom" and forbade their use. In less than ten years, the spruces again found themselves outside the law - in 1924, after the October Revolution, Christmas itself fell under the ban, which they began to call the "priest's holiday", and everyone who wanted to keep the custom was punished. Of course, in such a deep ideological struggle, Christmas tree garlands could not survive.

The tradition of decorating a spruce tree returned to Russia at the end of 1935. The authorities officially announced the celebration of the New Year with the decoration of coniferous trees. Interestingly, while the history of Christmas tree garlands in our country was full of difficulties, the invention was not popular all over the world either. Until 1930, middle-class consumers could not afford to buy such an expensive decoration for the holiday. The purchase of a garland of those years had to spend about 300 US dollars. The cost of the garland included light bulbs, wire, a generator and the work of an installer. Therefore, garlands in the early 1900s of the last century were most often rented. Only the appearance of special cartridges for light bulbs - scallops - finally reduced the price of Edward Jones's invention, which has been an unconditional hit of the Christmas and New Year holidays for the second century in a row.

Today, it is difficult to talk about how much Jones himself, the vice-premier of the Edison company, earned on the invention of electric garlands. Some sources claim that, thanks to publications in the influential Electrical World and the New York Times, the invention quickly became a glamor item in the homes of wealthy Americans who held dinner parties to show off the magnificent decoration of their Christmas trees. In other sources, the creation of Christmas tree garlands is completely attributed to a certain Englishman Ralph Morris, who invented a shimmering decoration for spruce before the moment when Edward Jones made a presentation of his own garland. Be that as it may, the person who managed to patent this invention could be very rich during his lifetime, because the production giant General Electric immediately joined the production of Christmas tree garlands, which could already promise impressive profits ...

No New Year is complete without garlands. This item of decoration is undoubtedly present in every home during the New Year period. A garland can bring a real festive atmosphere to your home. But not all of us know the history of the appearance of this decorative element. Where did the garland come from? This is what we will talk about today.

If you delve into history, you can stumble upon a very old biblical legend, which tells how three trees wanted to congratulate Christ on the birthday of Christ. These were palm, olive and spruce. All these trees had something to give, but the spruce had nothing but prickly needles and resin. The palm tree and the olive tree mocked the spruce, and the Angel, who was watching all this action, decided to take pity on the spruce, and after a few seconds it sparkled with many lights. It was to these lights that the newborn Christ turned his attention.

Another important event, which is directly related to the garlands, was the discovery of the tomb by archaeologists in 2006. This tomb is located near the Valley of the Kings near Luxor. After excavation, they found eight sarcophagi and in one of them were found the remains of ancient garlands. They were an ornament made of interweaving gold threads and flowers. According to one version, such garlands were worn by relatives of the late pharaoh. After the death of the majestic rulers, they also dressed in such decorations. Before the excavations were carried out, scientists could see the ancient prototype of garlands only in ancient drawings.

As for when the electric garland nevertheless appeared, there is no exact answer to this question. According to one version, the authorship was assigned to Edward Johnson, who, as you know, was an assistant to Thomas Edison. According to another version of Ralph Morris. Edward Johnson first presented his invention in 1882. He connected eighty light bulbs and painted them in different colors. Unfortunately, the invited journalists, and there were quite a few of them, did not show much interest in this invention. Apparently they were expecting something incredible. Of all the journalists present, only one became interested, and then not for long. So, it would seem that a great invention was left without due attention.

The idea of ​​​​creating a garland came to Ralph Morris in 1895. At that time he worked as a telephone operator. So, watching the flickering of light bulbs at work, he decided to decorate his Christmas tree in this way. Thanks to this, serial production of garlands was soon launched in America. In the future, the garland has already decorated the spruce in front of the White House in the United States. Thus, the garland has become a popular element of New Year's decor.

As for the appearance of garlands in Russia, they appeared only in 1938. This is primarily due to the First World War. At that time, Christmas tree decoration was considered a German custom and the idea was rejected. Garlands were allowed to be used only after the October Revolution at the end of 1935. Only this year, for the first time, people were able to celebrate the New Year with decorated Christmas trees that shone with hundreds of colorful lights.

Today, an important symbol of the New Year is Santa Claus, gifts under the tree and, of course, the tree itself, decorated with balls and twinkling lights. It is the garlands that create a special mood. But not many people know that such a garland appeared relatively recently and this device was once considered quite complicated from a technical point of view. The first prototypes were developed at the end of the 19th century so that today bright lights can be lit at home without any problems.

And what was "before"

Of course, before the advent of bright electric garlands, Christmas trees were also decorated, but this was used by candles and paper tinsel. The tradition is quite ancient and goes back to the times of Ancient Rome, where the decoration of trees with colorful ribbons was a symbol of fertility and the rebirth of life. As for candles on Christmas trees, they appeared only in the 15th century and gained particular popularity in the 16th century. Then it seemed to people that such a burning decor not only looks stylish and spectacular, but also scares away evil spirits. Peter 1 brought this tradition from Europe to Russia. Even then they began to play.

But, of course, decorating Christmas trees with candles, combined with wooden toys and paper tinsel, was dangerous in terms of fire. That is, there was always a need to come up with something colorful and cheerful to light the Christmas tree, but at the same time harmless and not leading to a fire.

Replacing candles with light bulbs

It must be honestly said that some specific and only accurate data, when and where the electric garland was first lit on the festive tree, has not been preserved. It is clear that the appearance of an electric garland exactly happened after the invention of incandescent lamps by Thomas Edison.

Historically, the fact that in 1882 several light bulbs, painted in different colors, were connected with one wire is historically captured. The invention then did not have much success, because the owner would have to independently screw the ends of the wire to the electrodes of each paw, then bring the garland to the light source - for people far from electricity it was hard.

Other information suggests that the garland was invented in the United States, made by this employee of the telephone company, Ralph Morris. He worked with rows of light bulbs in switchboards. And so, on the eve of the offensive of 1895, he decided to use them to decorate the Christmas tree. The idea went far and as a result, a luminous electric garland decorated the Christmas tree in front of the White House in Washington.

In Europe, the first electric garlands began to consecrate the Christmas trees in Finland since 1906. In Russia, the garlands arrived late in comparison with other European countries. Because, before the revolution, the invention of garlands was considered German and was not particularly welcomed, and after the revolution, the country's economic situation was difficult and definitely not up to garlands. So, the tradition of decorating the Christmas trees of the USSR with garlands began only in 1938. How beautiful with your own hands for the New Year.

Changing shapes and sizes

If you look at old photographs, it is fascinating the path that this invention has traveled in terms of its shape and color. For example, at first the first garlands were just light bulbs that were connected to each other by a wire. Then, plafonds of different colors and sizes appeared on the light bulbs, in the USSR stars were popular. Soon they began to change the blocks for turning on and off the garlands, to introduce various modes of glow and flashing.