Christmas lights have a magical appeal, and one that was used as part of a larger effort in the late 19th century to make electric indoor lighting more appealing.

And so, the story of Christmas lights is the story of electric lighting, and how business, brotherhood and brilliant ideas helped pave the way for this holiday tradition.

“Lighting in general — and of course, holiday lights — are so special because they beautify everything,” said Kathleen Carlucci, director of the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, NJ.

Long before electric Christmas lights entered the holiday scene, people in the 19th century were already using other lighting methods to decorate their homes during the holidays.

According to Carlucci, people would place candles on their Christmas trees to illuminate them.

“Of course, that’s so dangerous,” Carlucci said. “And so, the electrical lighting is a much better option.”

However, it was an option that people didn’t warm up to at first.

“People were still a little wary of electrical lighting because they were afraid of it,” Carlucci said. “It was dangerous if it wasn’t installed properly.”

People were accustomed to the age-old light sources: the sun, the fullest full moon and fire (which they harnessed in various implements, such as candles).

According to Carlucci, by the time Thomas Edison perfected the incandescent light bulb in 1879, the concept of using electricity to illuminate a space was still quite alien to most people.

“People are frequently unsure of the unknown, something they’re not familiar with,” Carlucci said.

Their familiarity with Edison’s invention would eventually grow, largely thanks to a colleague of his who also happened to be an innovative businessman.

When Johnson saw the potential of Edison’s incandescent light bulb amidst the public’s wary attitudes toward electric lighting, he came up with an idea to garner some positive publicity — and he did it by tying in the Christmas holiday.

“He lit his tree with about 80 red, white and blue lights,” Carlucci said. “He actually had to hand wire them. There was no such thing as tree lights, and so it was a long process for him.”

But this long process paid off.

“It really gathered the attention of the local neighbors, and then different newspapers and people came to see the beautiful lights,” Carlucci said.

“This was a great idea,” added Carlucci. “It really promoted the safety of electric lighting and the possible and potential beauty of it.”

Johnson’s stunt took a Christmas tradition and modernized it, all by replacing candles on Christmas trees with a string of Edison’s incandescent light bulbs.

Johnson’s mission to promote Edison’s work via Christmas lights was one example of how the inventor’s colleagues supported him.

In the 140 years since Johnson created the first Christmas tree lights, the practice of decorating with electric lights during the holidays has grown.

In this video I tested a Chinese LED strip rated for mains voltage. It runs directly on 220 / 230 / 240V AC with no power supply. The listing says it’s waterproof. This definitely raises some questions. I couldn’t resist the temptation to test how waterproof it really is. This video shows a lot of dangerous experiments you should never try to do!

Comments:
It’s waterproof in one direction: once water comes in, it never comes out again.
It definetly deserves a IP64 rating

Researchers playing with Twinkly IoT lights found security weaknesses that allowed them to display custom lighting effects and to remotely turn off their Christmas brilliance. They estimate that about 20,000 devices are reachable over the internet.

The LEDs in Twinkly lights can be controlled individually. Exploiting inherent security weaknesses related to authentication and the communication of commands, the researchers were able to use the curtain of lights to play Snake, the game made so popular by Nokia phones in the late 1990s.

Create a cozy atmosphere by projecting the flickering of lifelike artificial candle lights on the wall.

We’ve seen internet-enabled holiday displays before, and we know IPv6 offers much more space than the older IPv4 addressing scheme that most of us still use today, but the two have never been more spectacularly demonstrated than at jinglepings.com. The live video stream shows an Internet-connected Christmas tree and an LED display wall that you can control by sending IPv6 ICMP echo request messages, more commonly known as pings.

Reading the page, you quickly parse the fact that there are three ways to control the tree. First, you can type a message in the box and press send – this message gets displayed on the crawl at the bottom of the LED screen. Second, you can light up the tree by sending a ping to the IPv6 address 2001:4c08:2028:2019::RR:GG:BB, where RR, GG, and BB are 8-bit hex values for red, green, and blue. This is a neat abuse of the IPv6 address space