# Light’s Golden Jubilee stages a national fiftieth-anniversary of the lamp

Date: 1929

## The fact

On 21 October 1929 Light’s Golden Jubilee in Dearborn, organised with Henry Ford and attended by President Hoover, celebrated fifty years of [Edison](/people/thomas-edison)’s lamp as a national story. The stock-market crash followed days later; that crash is not this banquet.

## Context

The event re-enacted a laboratory scene. Assistants, Swan, and AC engineers were not the protagonists. Public memory hardened around a single name.

Thomas Edison is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

The Henry Ford’s jubilee documentation and Britannica independently date 21 October 1929.

Official or archival record: The Henry Ford — Edison and Light’s Golden Jubilee (https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/stories-of-innovation/what-if/thomas-edison/; The Henry Ford).

## Significance

Credit-concentration path in public memory. High confidence on the event.

A banquet is not a balance sheet. Store the credit-flattening without inventing a conspiracy.

## What is established and what is not

Established: 21 October 1929 jubilee with Edison, Ford and Hoover. Not established: that the banquet caused the crash, or that it cancelled Pearl Street’s utility gains.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Thomas Edison: https://factrail.ai/people/thomas-edison

## Drivers

- Political Polarization: https://factrail.ai/drivers/political-polarization

## Sources

- https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/stories-of-innovation/what-if/thomas-edison/
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Edison

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/us-edison-golden-jubilee-1929