I, for one, am thrilled to see this discussion pop up here! I am a history geek in general and the history of
stage lighting control is one of the areas where I have always had a keen interest. I am in my early 40's and I may be nearly the last generation of folks who would go from a small resistance
dimmer switchboard with
border lights in a Jr. High built in 1934, to a high school where I ran both a Strong Trouper AC
carbon arc AND a
Colortran Scenemaster 60 with ENR dimmers and then go off to college to learn the Light Pallette!
Over the holidays, I downloaded a copy of Joel Rubin's Doctoral dissertation "The technical development of
stage lighting apparatus in the United States, 1900-1950". What a fascinating read it was for me! Almost more fascinating than the actual text is the vast bibliography, especially hunting down some of the source materials regarding the development of remote-controlled reactance dimming and its employment in prestigious venues during the 1920s and 30s.
I did contact the library at Penn State where the Kliegl archives are to see what might be available online and got this response:
Dear Mr. Kieffer,
I'm afraid that the Kliegl archive is nowhere near the top of our digital priorities list, and it probably won't be for awhile. I'd love to have the collection scanned (it would certainly make life easier for me and for long-distance researchers like you!) but it would be a monumental and very expensive task. I'm usually able to find materials to answer queries about specific lighting projects, but a major research project would definitely have to include a trip to Penn State.
Sincerely,
Sandra Stelts
Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts
I don't really know where I was going with that request other than a geek's personal curiosity and quest for knowledge. I'm not really looking to write a paper for a degree program or publish a
book. Although, at the time the idea of some sort of comprehensive history of Kliegl Brothers and their key
role in the development of
stage lighting as we know it today was a glimmer in my imagination.
Another area of interest that I think has been been under-explored has been the "chicken/egg"
effect of how advances in lighting technology have changed how
theatre and opera have been designed, produced and presented both in the US and Europe. There are a lot of books out there that explain then-new technologies and how they might be applied, but other than perhaps Jean Rosenthal's "The Magic of Light", I am not aware of other texts that put the changes in technology in a larger historical context and explore how these advancement changed the industry from a design and production standpoint. There are certainly lots of journal articles out there that give us glimpses into this, but I have yet to find anything remotely comprehensive.
In between tech weeks, I have been doing some exploration of John Howard's 1982 publication "A Bibliography of
Theatre Technology" in regard to lighting. It's already very outdated at 33 years, but it has sent me down some amusing avenues at both the Minneapolis Public and University of Minnesota Libraries.
This is a long way of saying that I hope I am welcome to this discussion and I also hope to learn by sitting at the feet of the "masters".