Everybody at Menlo Park, a village in the state of New York, expected merry Christmas holidays. The year 1882 was a success – Edison and his assistants got 141 patents on their inventions, one patent in each 2.5 days. The Christmas eve was not an exception. A new idea occurred to Edward Johnson as he brought home a Christmas tree. The assistant to the inventor of a mass-produced lamp found it old-fashioned to decorate the tree with plain candles and he was the first one in the world to arrange a string of lights on his Christmas tree. He did not have a lot of followers for a simple reason: strings of lights began to be sold to the public only in the early 20th century. It took another 20 years for the public to get used to them, so Christmas tree lights became a must-have only in the early 1920s. But as we know, strange coincidences sometimes happen – the GOELRO plan in Russia was adopted right on December 22, 1920.
