Control/Dimming Historical Lighting Control Discussion

STEVETERRY

Well-Known Member
Over the past couple of years, a very important email discussion has been going on about the early days of lighting control and the details of early control systems in the US and the UK. The email participants are the people who forged our lighting control industry such as Dave Bertenshaw, Tony Brown, Martin Moore, Richard Pilbrow, Jim Laws, Joel Rubin, and many others.

In an effort to create a home for this important discussion so that it can be memorialized and not lost to the vagaries of email, I am creating this thread as a starting point, in the hope that the discussion will migrate to CB and be preserved.

We will see who shows up!

ST
 
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".
 
There has been so much interest here and many, many threads regarding historical stage lighting and control. I wonder if it may be time to have a sub-domain with it's own board such as "history.controlbooth.com" where these threads could find a home. There are so many sub-topics alone, such as; dimming, pre-electric, historical fixtures, carbon arc, power distribution, DC in the theater, etc., just in the lighting realm. Add to that; Historic sound, stage evolution, buildings and codes, historic disasters, and you can see why a whole board could be developed.
The other factor is that as the years go on there will be less and less of us that experienced these things first hand. Anyhow, just my thoughts on the matter.
 
So….
The crickets are chirping.
Is it OK to start posting old Kliegl brochures here to keep people interested?
I have MB of old Kliegl stuff scanned that I could post.
For that matter I also have MB of old Ward-Leonard & other American stuff scanned that hasn't been posted before….
 
So….
The crickets are chirping.
Comments and Interest are always two very different things. You may look at a thread and say to yourself, "Neat", but then never post a reply. The near 400 views of this thread at this time indicate the interest is there, but most of the posts on this board are Problem/Solution related. Resources rarely generate the "talk traffic", but are appreciated and used) by many!
 
Wow! I am just a newbie, but I am so so thankful for this thread. Here in India, even at the Drama School, we use only basic analogue consoles with mostly rotary dimmers even now. We have used auto dimmers for scene works as well as programmable consoles with auto input (though still analog) for productions. But that's the most advanced for the country in general, especially when it comes to theatre. There are always problems with power and voltage, but the newest problems creeping up now is the disadvantage of using software systems within the dimmer and console packs which have not been updated for ages (due to financial constraints). Our curriculum at the National School of Drama doesn't even touch upon the topics that you have been discussing here. But it's so needed for young professionals like me from developing countries. Hopefully I will be able to learn more and more once at start my graduate training at Yale TD&P. Thank you STEVETERRY for starting this thread. I will keep coming back to it. PS : I can hardly understand most of the technical terms, and I might be using terms incorrectly too. Hope to correct them soon.
 
I am creating this thread as a starting point, in the hope that the discussion will migrate to CB and be preserved.
While it may be too "modern" (starting in 1963), I'll once again direct viewers to the Collaborative Article: Memory Lighting Control Systems, History.

To bring the article relevant to this discussion, I have no problem with deeming punch card, platten preset, and other "infinite preset" systems as "memory systems." Hand-writing dimmer levels on a cue sheet may be one stretch too far, however.

On the other hand, if we wish to limit this thread to just "the dimmer end," I have no problem with that either.

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I wonder if it may be time to have a sub-domain with it's own board such as "history.controlbooth.com" where these threads could find a home.
@JD, you may recall, we tried that for a time, but the idea was abandoned.
I'll submit your suggestion to the staff, but you should be aware that we did have a Theatre History forum, kept it for over a year I believe, but ultimately it was removed because:
1. Lack of interest/posts/activity. Its threads were dispersed into other department threads.
2. Caused confusion over what should go in the history section, and what in the department thread. Is the history of the Leko considered Lighting or History? Both obviously, and our compromise was adding the optional "Vintage Lighting" thread prefix.
 
Might be worth reconsidering considering how inexpensive server disk space has become.
One way to organize such a history may be to separate various eras of lighting and dimmer control. Each system has had it's "hayday" in history, with some overlap, but there are several core technologies that spanned certain years. For example:
Salt
Resistance
Reactance
Autotransformer
Even the early days of SCR made for some memorable systems!
I would suspect in the end that the metrics for judgment should be based on viewership as compared to active posts. Even viewership may not be as good a metric as importance. To those that take interest, such a forum would be more of a monument or museum used to teach/learn about the development of the industry. Or, a reference library for those occasional topics that come up in other threads.
 
Does any old school systems out there still use mag-amps for dimming control?

I looked through the http://www.controlbooth.com/wiki/?title=Category:Memory-Lighting-Control-Systems-History page, and found a picture of the old Strand Mini-Pallette that my high school used back in the late 1980s. It was pretty amazing at a time where personal computers barely existed (think about the time when the 80286 was brand new and 3.5" 'floppies' didn't exist yet!), our high school had a computertized light control system where we could create shows and save them on a 5.25" floppy disk! Interestingly, we also had a more manual board with ~48 faders and some programmable submasters. If memory serves, I believe that the actual dimmer packs were magnetic.

I was away from theater lighting for a long time (just coming back within the last few years), and it's amazing how much things have changed! I'm having a great time learning DMX and trying to comprehend what can be done with RGB lighting, multi-pixel strip lights, etc. (I haven't touched moving heads yet...)
 
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As to magnetic amplifier dimming systems that are still operational, I would venture to guess that it's very few or none. Magnetic amplifier dimming systems were really only around for about 10 years or so from the late 1940s until the late 1950s. The technology was an upgrade to the reactance type dimmer that was made possible, in part, to technical advances in electronics during WWII. By the early 1950s both Strand and Century had large format thyratron tube dimmers on the market and in the very late 1950s solid-state rectifier dimming came on the market and pretty much obliterated the market for magnetic amplifiers within a very short time.

If anyone else has information about any magnetic amplifier systems that might still be functional I'd be interested in hearing about it. I have a hunch that if there are any still operational it would be in small venues in once wealthy neighborhoods where the lighting system has effectively been abandoned for years out of benign neglect.
 
Has anyone (besides me, that is) run into a system of motorized autotransformer dimmers, controlled from a pilot board of variable resistors (with little handles, "just like real dimmers")? The control circuit was a bridge, with the variable resistor control on one side and a similar resistor on the dimmer on the other side, with a relay which detected the difference controlling the "UP" and "DOWN" of the dimmer motor. Yep, only one speed up or down, and bridge balance detection was pretty poor. I don't know who built it but it was mid-'50s.

Scenemaster60: you might want to get hold of the guys who run http://www.klieglbros.com. They have a lot of Klieg literature and at least one piece of equipment which hasn't made it onto the site yet.
 

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