On New Year's Eve, 1879, Thomas Edison unveiled his newest invention: the electric light. Reporters came from all over the U.S. to see Edison's Menlo Park lab lit up with his incandescent bulbs.

The history of how these mass-produced novelty lights became a holiday fixture is a distinctly American Christmas tale.

The electric light bulb inspired the development of the radio valve and the television tube.Can we imagine what the world would have been like in the 20th and 21st centuries without the light bulb?

Light bulbs have been the standard mode of illuminating homes in the United States for more than a century after replacing ...