It's Time to Light the Lights

adam Ant were sharing the bill. So as I filed into the venue with many of my fellow gen xers and y'all, it looked like it was a college reunion in my case, not that I recognize people, but you know, it's rare that I'm out with a group of people who are in the same age range as I am. Anyway, I started to do what I often do when I go out to stuff. I started to think, how can I mine this experience I'm having for an episode of tech Stuff, Which was tricky because I've already done episodes

about electric guitars. We played a classic one on Monday if you miss that, that was the episode that originally aired back in two thousand and nine. Now I've done episodes about microphones, I've done episodes about loud speakers. I've done episodes about synthesizers. I might do an episode on knee or hip replacements, because, again, based on the average age of the folks who were in that building, I'm pretty sure that would have been a relevant thing to

my experience that night. And yes, I am joking around, but this is to remind you also I am in that age group. I am joking about myself. But there was a point in the show where one of the young folks on stage, appearing with the acts, invited us

to jump to the music. About five percent of the crowd actually made a half hearted effort to do so, and everyone else was like, you know what, no gravity and I have reached an understanding we're not going to potentially invite disaster with blowing out a knee or a hip or something. So that was a real thing. But while the show was going on, one thing that did

spring to mind was the lighting there. The venue we were in was a pretty decent size here in Atlanta, it's called the Eastern It's not a huge venue, but it is significantly larger than the tiny little clubs I would go to when I was in college in Athens, Georgia.

Back in those days, everybody was in a band. Everybody would get signed at some point to play one of these small venues, and so I went to them a lot, and it was clear that this venue, the Eastern, had a really good setup for groups coming in to rig up their lighting and everything, and the acts had really sophisticated systems controlling those lights and creating really cool effects. And you know, again, this isn't like a huge arena show. It's not like you know, Van Halen in the late

seventies or eighties. But it was really impressive. And I thought, well, you know what, I did do an episode about the history of stage lighting, but I haven't really explored the history of computerized lighting rigs. So that's kind of what we're going to talk about. It is like moving lights, not just what lights were used to illuminate the stage, but how are they controlled and manipulated. What's the evolution of the concert or show lighting rig and how do

they work. Now, clearly there's going to be overlap with my older episodes on stage lighting. If you're curious and you want to hear those older episodes. They include an episode titled Lights Tech Stuff Action that published on June seventeenth, twenty twenty. And then there was tech stuff Steps Out of the Lime Light that published on June twenty second, twenty twenty, but really more interested in the systems that activate the lights and control brightness and move lights around

rather than the lights themselves. In this case, we will talk a little bit about lights because it's kind of hard not to, but that it's not really the pun intended focus of this episode. So let's consider the evolution of theater briefly, just to kind of get our minds in the right place. If you go back just a few centuries, as we all do on occasion, many theaters were outdoor venues, so all of your lighting was natural in that case, right, you had no control over it.

Generally speaking, you put up shades or whatever to kind of shape the lighting a bit, but other than that, this was beyond your control, and no one really thought too much about lighting effects. You just told your story and entertained your audience, or at least you tried to entertain them. Your success rate largely dependent upon the circumstances at the time and the people you were playing to.

But when theatrical productions began to move into buildings, which happened throughout history at different times, but there were challenges that you had to overcome. So how do you light a scene so that people can see it, because before the era of electricity, light would have to come from sources like lanterns and torches and candles. And to be clear, the era of indoor theater itself has a lot of

overlap with outdoor theater. It's not like everything was outdoors and then one day everybody said, you know, let's pound sand and go indoors. In Shakespeare's time, for example, there were both kinds of theatrical houses. So the Globe, one of the most famous theaters in Shakespeare's time, had a large stage exposed to the elements, and then you had smaller theatrical houses that were indoors, like the Blackfriars that

was an indoor house. Interestingly, in Elizabethan times, at any rate, the indoor theater houses were seen as places for younger theatrical troops. By that, I mean like the actors were often boys or very young men, often school boys. So the adult actors would perform on the much larger outdoor stages generally, and the indoor stages were used for people who were still learning their craft. The difference in stage size also meant the subject matter and indoor venues was

often far less action oriented. They were more talky, in other words, a lot more talking than acting, like in big fight sequences, So you just didn't have the room to do something like a big battle scene that you would find and say Richard the third or Henry the fifth.

But that indoor lighting, while initially a challenge, also presented opportunities because a clever theatrical company could come up with new ways to light a scene in order to add to the effect that scene would have on the audience, or at least they might try to do that. As it stood, you often had to pause between scenes so that members of the company could do things like trim back the wicks of lanterns or replace burnt out candles,

because you know they would be consumed over time. So sometimes it just meant that the show would kind of come to a brief stop, not like a full intermission like you would have in a modern show, but it would stop for a minute or two while people would change out light. One early proposed design for an indoor lighting system that could be done while a scene is in play, so sort of a dynamic system where you

could adjust the light. Was this concept of a pulley where you would feed a line through the pulley and you'd hold one end of the line. The other end would hold up one or more cans, and the can would have its opening facing downward, and you would position this over a candle so the candles lit, and then you could lower the rope or lower this can down by using the pulley, and you would allow the can to lower down and cover or partially cover the candle.

This would allow you to dim the scene. Obviously, you couldn't go too far down or you would extinguish the candle, as the candle would burn out all the available oxygen inside the can and then just sort of sputter out. But yes, you could do this to actually dim the scene. At least that the concept. It wasn't exactly high tech. It was literally a rope holding a canister that could be lowered over a candle. And I didn't see any indication that such a thing was ever actually used. It

was proposed. There are sketches that show this, obviously no photographs or anything. I mean we're talking about like the sixteen hundreds here, but it showed that people were thinking about this about ways to affect the lighting while a performance is underway in order to convey a mood or

emotion to an audience. But it would take some time, quite some time for this concept to really become practical, and honestly, we have to jump way, way way ahead beyond the discovery of electricity and our ability to harness electricity and the creation of electrical lighting. Now that's not to say that people in theater did an experiment with different methods for lighting and getting across a certain feeling

through lighting effects. They did try lots of different stuff, but some of those were really gimmicky or they were one offs and not indicative of a larger movement, nor did they really build toward the technologies that ultimately would replace them. So we're just gonna skip them instead. We're going to talk about some early attempts to motorize and

then automate lighting controls for stage work. So one patent filed way back in nineteen twenty five and awarded in nineteen twenty eight was something that a guy named H. F. King filed for, and it was he just called his invention a light projector. In the description of the invention, HF.

King writes, quote, the principal object of the invention is to produce a light projector which may be moved automatically to cause the stream of light beams to move through a predetermined path and spot successively a plurality of objects, and hold the spot for an interval on at least one of said objects. End quote. Okay, let's break that down,

make it plane English. Essentially, what HF. King is saying is that the invention he proposed is for a light that on its own could move through a predetermined path and then it could stop on one or more spots for however long it was that you had programmed the light to do. This. Programming is being used not in the computer sense in this case. It's more like setting, like making a setting where the light will hold on this position for whatever given amount of time you need.

The illustrations accompanying the patent really helped me understand King's invention. Like a lot of patents, the language gets to be pretty like obtuse, but the illustrations help a lot, and he illustrated electric lamps mounted on a housing that could pivot either vertically or horizontally, so they could tilt or pan essentially or vertical motion. The tilting, an electric motor would connect to a gear and this gear, in turn would connect to a second gear attached to the yoke

the housing for the light itself. So you had an electric motor turning a gear and it would be connected to the second gear via a chain. So it's a chain drive kind of like what you would see in a bicycle, right, So the gear would engage the chain and that would in turn move the other gear to adjust the tilting of the light. So turning the motor in one direction would allow you to tilt the light upward.

Turning the motor and the other direction would have you tilt the light downward, and very clever and I thought it was a really neat kind of of concept. Now, horizontal movement, the panning, so panning left or right was using just a simple gear system. There was no chain drive for this. It was a gear system connected to

the overall mount for the lamp. So again you would have like the teeth of these gears engage and turn the lamp either to the left or to the right, and it just be connected to the larger motor for the overall lamp. So Kings patent describes a potential use case for his invention that brings in the automatic part of this concept, because so far you're talking about these gears and motors. You could just rig up a control system that allowed you to manually adjust where this light

was pointed. Right. Maybe you have like a dial, for example, to control panning, and maybe a second deal to control tilt. And by adjusting the values, you could engage the motors and turn the lamp to point to wherever you needed. But he wanted an automated system. He describes a store window behind which you might have several items that the store wants to highlight to the window shopper, one after

the other. So just imagine that you've got this display, but it's in the dark, it's behind a shop window, you're on the street, you're looking in, and then a spotlight turns on and it shines on let's say, let's chair, and then the light suddenly swivels and moves to highlight a cl and then it moves again to show a radio and so on. Now, eventually the light finishes its tour of consumer goods. And goes back to the beginning

of the sequence. So King explains that his idea was to create this gadget that can focus on any specific spot within a physical space for a given amount of time, and you would essentially program the lamp to shine on a point for let's say five seconds before moving to a separate specific point and then staying there for like ten seconds and so on. So how did King handle

the timing? Well, again, you know, this is in the early nineteen twenties, mid nineteen twenties, So he used mechanical action with a series of gears that could be set so that the light would stay at any particular spot for a particular amount of time, and the electric motor would provide the power for the system, and the gears and the chain drives and all that stuff would do all the mechanical work. And it was very clever, but obviously something that was best suited for a static display,

not for a stage play. You know, you couldn't theory design a performance round this kind of technology. But think about that, the light would be pre set to go through this sequence, which means your performance would have to match the timing that was pre set on this Because you couldn't adjust the lighting on the fly. It was going to do what it was going to do because that's what the gears had been set to. So there was no real room for artistic improvisation. So this lighting

system would not be ideal for a live performance. Instead, you would just probably end up missing your cue or being in the dark or whatever. But the ideas that King suggested would evolve to find their way into stage systems down the line. We'll talk more about those in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So the physical components that would move lights, clearly, they would evolve. But

what about controlling banks of lights? Right, so we're stepping away from the system that would actually make the lights pan and tilt. Let's talk about the larger aspect. Instead of an individual light, you have to control a whole series of lights and make them do what you need them to do. How do you do that? Well, you know, it's one thing to have a light capable of changing direction or dimming or brightening or whatever, but it's another

thing to just have a whole mess of these lights. Now, fortunately, there was another technology that was evolving around the same time as the tech that would allow us to make a lamp move physically, and that would be the control console or the electrical switchboard. And these switchboards were essentially circuit managers, with the early ones were just using resistance dimmers.

So resistance refers to the tendency of a particular material or component to resist the flow of electricity through it. Either current or voltage just depends upon the nature of the resistor. Some materials have very little electrical resistance. They are good conductors. In other words, they very much allow facilitate electricity to flow through them. Some materials have very

very high resistance. They serve as good insulators. Some materials or some components have variable resistance, which changes under certain conditions. I might have to do a full episode about variable resistors in the future because that does require a lot more explanation and would get us way off track. But the important thing to remember is that if you increase the resistance on a circuit, you can change the value

of the current or voltage of that circuit. And with the case of resistance stemmers, we're really talking about the current. So the switchboard would allow an operator to manually switch a light circuit so that the circuit flowed through a resistor, and that meant the output would be reduced. The amount of current output by the circuit would reduce, which meant the electrically powered light the load on the circuit would

mean that the lights would produce less light. They would dim in other words, so essentially the operator was denying the lamp the juice it needed to shine on like a crazy diamond. So resistance dimmers they're obsolete now, we don't use these anymore. They were used on Broadway Way Way longer than they were used in other parts of the theatrical world because Broadway was really stuck in its

ways for a very long time. And also, like you had people who had spent a huge amount of money establishing these theaters, and they weren't super keen on the idea of having to rip out the systems that were working okay, just to upgrade them to something better, because that's money that they could use to I don't know, wlpe their cigars or whatever. I've got this weird idea

of what theater owners are like. I don't know any personally, so it's all just based off the stereotypes scene in media anyway, they were a very early means of giving theatrical light operators some control over the lighting of scenes beyond just switching lights on or off. They could now dim the lights by using these resistance dimmers. And they date all the way back to the eighteen hundreds actually, but they would be used in Broadway really up to

the nineteen seventies. Kind of crazy that Broadway would rely on this old technology for so long while other theaters would upgrade much faster. Michael Mell, president of a company called Theater Design, has an article about lighting equipment in which he reveals that the dimmer switchboards on Broadway got the name piano boards because the actual board that housed these resistance stemmers kind of looked a little bit like

an upright piano. So, as he writes, quote, running on DC current, each six kilowatt or three kilowatt quote unquote plate introduced resistance into the circuit. To dim the lights, a Broadway musical might use six PM boards, eighty two dimmers controlling a total of two hundred eighty two kilowatts of light, and five fourteen slash three kilowat boards, typically

one stage hand operated two piano boards end quote. Now, as I said, control consoles would evolve over time, and by the mid twentieth century, at least outside of Broadway, you were looking at boards that would have dozens or even more than one hundred channels. So channels in this case, essentially it refers to separate dedicated circuit pathways. You can think of these as like alternate paths that electricity can take in order to do whatever it is needs to do. Now,

obviously keeping all the channels organized is important. You know, knowing that channel one controls a specific light or bank of lights versus channel five. That's the difference between a scene being bathed in light appropriately or a scene being performed in darkness while an empty part of the stage is really well lit. You don't want that second thing happening unless it's meant for, like a comedy, like the

Play that Goes Wrong or something. As early as nineteen thirty four, the Royal Opera House in London was using a Grand Master board, which had one hundred and thirty channels that in turn could connect to up to one hundred and seventy five dimers. Obviously, some demers would share a single channel. By the nineteen fifties, lighting systems were making use of magnetic amplifiers rather than the old demer

resistance method. Again assuming you weren't on Broadway. So now instead of putting a load on an electronic circuit to reduce current outflow, you could use an amplifier, and you would use an amplifier to boost a signal. If you boost a signal, then you'd get brighter lights, or you could ease off on the amplifier to allow a weaker signal to go for demmer lights. And one big advantage of this approach is that the board didn't have to

be super close to the load. So the old resistance demers the ones that would control lights like on Broadway or whatever, typically these had to be fairly close to the lights that they controlled. So that meant that, you know, you had to have operators at various points around the stage to control that specific group of lights and to allow them to dim or brighten, and you couldn't have

like one centralized light operator station. And it was a very collaborative effort in order to be able to control lights appropriately for performance. Now back to moving lights. A European company called Pani built a moving lighting system in the nineteen fifties. Some of the references I saw said it was Austrian company, some said German. And I tried to find more information about this, to get actual details about how did the system work, how is it invented?

And I could find a lot of presentations and articles that mentioned Pani and mentioned the moving lights, but they didn't have a whole lot of details, Like I couldn't really follow that up with information about who was responsible for creating the system and how did it work, you know, or how a controller could provide input that would control

the movement of the connected theatrical lights. So it's interesting that we're talking about the nineteen fifties here, where maybe you would have like an electronic panel in front of you with dials and faders and that kind of thing, and that by changing these controls you could you manipulate these lights without having to actually set your hands on

the lights themselves. But you know, we're also still talking about an era where computerized controllers are still a couple of decades off, because in the nineteen fifties, you weren't using computerized systems. Computers in the nineteen fifties, were these these systems that took up entire floors of buildings. You

wouldn't have one just to use for a stage production. Now, I don't know if the Ponte lights had any automated aspects to them, or if truly it was just electronic movement systems, but a human operator had to manually change everything around, Like I don't know if there were any preset from those eras. I mean, later Ponti lights definitely have precas, but at that time I just don't know. So it did, provide, however, a lot more flexibility and

nuance for lighting technicians in either case. So we've gone from being able to control a very simple process like brightening or dimming a light, to being able to move lights to shine on specific parts of the stage, all from a control system, rather than having to have someone stationed at each individual light. In nineteen fifty five, a fellow named George Charles Eisenower. That's iz noo r, and it's pronounced eisen Hour. From what I understand, he founded

a consulting company for theater design. So he also had a prestigious career as a professor at Yale, where he taught things like lighting and theater design. And he worked on innovating in that field. He designed electronic dimming systems

for theaters. He patented a lot of different technologies over his time, and his control system would simplify operations so that a single lighting operator could control all the lighting in a theatrical house, thus eliminating the need for having all these individual stations where you would have an operator handling two banks of resistant stemmers. So a huge, huge leap forward. Also, from what I understand, Eisenhower was ken

tankeris is probably the wrong word. He had very exacting standards, and apparently some people found him incredibly useful and helpful to work with, and other folks really clashed with him. So he's kind of a love or hate kind of guy. From what I understand, I never met him. As a professor, Eisenhower oversaw countless efforts to create better and more versatile

moving lights. And these stage lights could again pan and tilt, and they use electric motors servos essentially to do the work of turning the light or tilting the light in specific directions according to the control inputs. Now back to the control board. One thing that engineers figured out how to do is to make preset boards, So we have to think of the whole control schema in order for

this to make sense. At the top, you've got the master control board, right, This is the board that determines which pathway the various circuits form in order to get a specific result. But subject to the master control board could be these preset boards. And as the name suggests, a preset board could be pre set to specific values so that when the master control board switched power to that specific preset, you would get the effect that was

programmed on that preset. So let's say you're doing a theatrical production, and let's say that you know you've got your script and you see then the script, there's a scene that's going to be set in a darkened bedroom. That the rest of this show is going to be very bright and colorful, but you're going to have one sequence in a bedroom where it's supposed to be dim. Now, clearly you're still going to need lights because you want to convey to the audience that it's a dark in bedroom,

but they still need to see what's going on. You can't just have a dark stage. I mean you could, but then this discussion doesn't matter. So you want to give the feeling that it's a darkened bedroom without it actually being so dark that no one can see anything. So you spend some time during tech. Tech is the period where you are setting up the lights and the sound and everything for your play. It's one of the

most frustrating parts of being an actor. Probably even more frustrating for stage managers and directors, but it's frustrating as an actor because it means that you are going through the play seen by scene, but there's a lot of stopping and starting because the tech crew is trying to get the technical aspect, the lighting and everything at just the right levels to tell the story that they want to tell. And as an actor, you're sitting there like, but I just want to say my lines and walk

to where I need to walk and look pretty. But you're not allowed to do that because you got to be part of the team. Actors hate being part of the team. I'm making a lot of generalizations, but I've also been in a lot of productions anyway. So what you're doing is you're getting your lights set in the right position, the right brightness, the right color temperature. You want to make sure that the scene is lit the

way that you really intended. And then once you do that, then you have it set to one of these preset boards, which essentially saves all those settings. Essentially says, all right, these, you know, fifteen lights out of fifty are going to be active for this scene. They're all going to be

in these specific directions and brightness, et cetera. And then when you use a fader on the master control board, you can shift to that preset bank of lights and the lighting scheme that you created for that scene will come up, and then the other lighting will come down

and voil a, you've got the transition. So preset boards typically would have multiple banks that as collections of settings, so you could just designate different banks of lighting settings for different scenes, and you can use controls like a cross fader to shift from one bank of settings to another, typically in a really gradual way, so that the transition isn't jarring. Unless that's actually your intent. You could do a jarring lighting transition that is specifically meant to draw

attention to itself. That is a valid way of expressing art through light as well, but obviously you have to be intentional with it. If it's done by accident, then it just kind of detracts from the experience. Okay, we're going to take another quick break to thank our sponsors. When we come back, we're going to be talking more about the rock and or roll world. Okay, so before the break, you know that we're going to talk about rock and roll. And that's because rock and roll shows

would take lighting systems and kick them into overdrive. Because it's one thing to design these lighting systems for theaters, but innovation in theater is a very gradual thing generally speaking, like from a technical perspective anyway, but rock and roll would really push things much harder because while you did have these theatrical houses making big strides and innovation, you know, their goal was really to just create specific lighting effects

for specific scenes, and the lighting operator's job was just to switch the lights from scene to scene to get the right effect. I don't mean to diminish lighting operators jobs. They're very important, but you know, they had a very well defined set of parameters they were working inside rock and roll, though, that would really open up new opportunities and challenges. So by this time, we're getting up into the early nineteen seventies and rock acts were really starting

to fill out larger venues. So it's not just clubs and bars and smaller theaters that we're talking about. We're talking about, you know, maybe huge concert halls or really we're getting into the sporting arena era of rock and roll, like when bands would fill out stadiums and not every place would be fitted to provide sound and lighting to

a big, theatrical rock and roll concert. That's not what they were intended for, and so it meant that you had to repurpose the space to get the effect you wanted, and that opened up the opportunity for engineers to create new companies that specifically we're catering to touring music acts, because it was such a hassle if you were on tour and your production team had to sit there and say, okay, well we've just arrived in Dallas, let's find out what sort of equipment we can rent in order to get

the sound and the lights that we need. Then we're going to move and go to Houston and we're going to do it all over again. Then we're going to go to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We're going to do it all over again, which meant that the shows weren't consistent, right, because you wouldn't have access to the same equipment, either sound or lights, and so you couldn't create a specific

effect that kind of defined that tour. It gave rise to companies that would essentially be hired to provide sound and lighting for a band as it went through its whole tour. So the whole setup would travel from town to town. It wouldn't just be you know, go there, find what you can, cobble it together, and then break it down and return it. You'd be bringing your gear

from one show to the next. And this was a huge, huge undertaking still is I mean, it's enormous undertaking to arrive in town ahead of the band, set everything up, test it, make sure it all works, operate it during the show, break it down after the show, and then

do it all over again. And because there was this really healthy sense of competition in the rock and roll space in particular, artists naturally wanted that their tour to be more impressive than say that other band's tour, right, Like, if you're a part of a big band, you want your show to really be the one that defines the rock and roll experience, not someone else's show. So you also wanted to be bigger than your last tour. You

wanted everything to be built upon the past. So if you're in Van Halen, you definitely want your show to be bigger and more impressive than the one that Boston put on the band Boston that is, I mean, that's more than a feeling, so to speak, it is a need. But to achieve these lofty goals of rocking the butts off your audience with sounds and sites that get positively overwhelming, it meant that the tech companies that were setting up these systems had to keep pushing for new approaches. Right.

You had to solve for big problems like you weren't in the same space night after night, So you couldn't just set it and forget it, right. You couldn't just create an experience for a show and then that's good. You're done. Your work is you just have to operate and now you're finished. So another thing was that relying on standard theatrical lights meant that you started to reach a physical limitation of the venues themselves, because the rigs you would create sooner or later would get too heavy

to be supported from the venues ceiling. By rigs. That means essentially the scaffolding that's holding up all those lights. If you're loading up on more and more lights, as your systems get far more complicated and you're trying to get these incredible concert effects, eventually you reach the limit of what the venue itself can physically support and you have to start thinking smaller, or at least think lighter. Now, one of the reasons why weight was such a challenge

had to do with color of lights. So with some lighting systems for theatrical lighting, if you're lighting a theater and you need to adjust the color or the temperature of a light in order to get a specific effect, maybe you want the light to be like natural sunlight. Well, the lights put out by certain types of bulbs doesn't look like sunlight. So typically you would use a gel, or maybe a collection of lights with different gels on them.

The gel refers to a thin sheet of colored material that you mount in front of a light, so the light passes through the gel and then hits the stage.

So back in the nineteen fifties, a lot of the gels were made from acetate, but later the industry would shift to other like polycarbonates with a higher melting point because the lights they were using were really freaking hot, and even acetate would melt at the higher temperatures, and even with materials that have very high tolerance for heat, they would have a limited life span depending upon the

shade of light they were showing. So some gels that were like really heavily saturated, so like there's a lot of color in this gel, they often had shorter life spans. They would you know, fade or melt after just a couple of uses, or maybe even after a single show. Light with shorter wavelengths also had this issue, so like your blues and purples, for example, and you would have to switch these out much more frequently, so you might just use a you know, a single gel for a

single light. So that also meant that if you wanted to use lots of different colors in your show, well you had to have a dedicated lamp for each color for that particular area of your lighting rig. So depending on the number of colors you wanted to represent, that multiplies the number of lights you need to use, right, because you would have certain individual lights dedicated just for blue and then others for green and others for orange.

And others for red and others for white. And that adds tons of lights to your lighting rig, and that means adding a lot of more weight. Now, with all these additional lights, you also need increasingly complex control systems as well as cooling systems. Like some of these lights get super dup or hot, and it can be a fire hazard if you don't have ways of keeping things cool.

It's interesting some companies actually experimented with water cooling their lights, but engineers and electricians were like, this might not be the best idea to introduce water to electrical systems that could potentially short out and then you could even you know, actually cause a fire as opposed to prevent one. Now, one thing that would help with this development early on, before the development of multicolor LEDs anyway, was the development

of dichroic filters. So these filters, they are lenses. Essentially, they look like glass lenses, but they have these layers inside them that ultimately allow certain wavelengths of light to pass through and reflect other wavelengths of light. And that means that you get different colors to come through depending upon the nature of the filter you're using. And these would not fade or melt like glass is far more

resilient than polycarbonate is. So if you used a motorized system that could raise or lower these filters or combine the filters, then you could actually change the color of lights using a single lamp. Like the lamp itself would be, you know, whatever the normal color would be. So let's just say it's giving out white light. But you could have these filters that pop up or or retract down through a motorized system to go in front of the

light and then change the color of light. And that means that you could have a single light represent many different colors and thus reduced the complexity and the weight of the system. Right, it doesn't You don't need all these dedicated lights for specific colors. Now. In addition to that,

innovations and lamp size were helping a lot too. So there were like tungsten and halogen lights that led up to this, but then after that were much smaller lights discharge lights for example, that could still put out a pretty decent intensity of light, but they dramatically reduced the size that you needed. So the lamps themselves got much smaller, and that would allow for more varied lighting effects as well, and that was good for the folks who are shredding

on the stage. I also, you know, if you've been listening to tech stuff for a long time, there is a word that we used to use a lot more frequently on the show, but still plays a part in later episodes, which is convergence. Right, this convergence of different factors that because of all those different factors, we would get this new thing. So in this case, there were a lot of other advancements that were going on in technology that were converging that would help create the modern

amazing stage lighting system. For one thing, the development of the transistor in the nineteen fifties led to solid state electronics and integrated circuits. I cannot express how huge that is or really how small ironically, because it would lead to miniaturization. Right, Suddenly, all this complex circuitry that used to require physical components connected to physical wires and you would just have like this mass of wires and cables

and stuff. Now you could have solid state electronics takeover a lot of that and reduce the amount of space needed dramatically, and that would be a huge help these lighting systems. It also meant that computer technology was advancing rapidly.

Once we got to miniaturization, the brakes were off. That's when we start getting into things like Gordon Moore making his observation that every two years or so you could double the number of components on a square inch of silicon chip, and thus effectively you could double your computer processing every two years or so. That's where we get

Moore's law. Well, that same thing meant that the introduction of semiconductors and integrated circuits would open up huge new opportunities in computerized systems in general, and control systems for lights would be one of many ways we would see that manifest Now, going back to Michael Mell, who I talked about earlier, he says that the first computer light

board for stagecraft on Broadway. So remember Broadway lagged behind the rest of the theatrical industry, but the first one that was a computerized system for controlling light was for the debut production of A chorus Line, a musical that I personally despise but of course line, which debuted in nineteen seventy five. The system used was called an EDILS

eight EDI in this case stands for Electronics Diversified. That was the company that made this, and it was created by a guy named Gordon Pearlman in North Carolina, and it consisted of a computer, a control board, and a terminal display and the whole thing was like the size of a desk. It had one hundred channels and Melsa's ninety six of them were used for a chorus line. And it cost a cool one hundred thousand dollars back

in nineteen seventy five. If we adjust that for inflation, it means that it would set you back about six hundred thousand dollars today, So very expensive system for controlling your lights. The EDILS eight incorporated a different computer that was created by the Digital Equipment Company or dec Deck,

and it was the DP eight mini computer. So the LS eight was a twelve bit system that probably sounds odd to a lot of y'all out there, because often we talk about systems that are eight bit or sixteen bit, or a thirty two bit or sixty four bit, and you see how that pattern goes right eight eight times to his sixteen sixteen times to his thirty two, thirty

two times to his sixty four, et cetera. But this was a twelve bit system and it was made back in the days before we gravitated toward the whole eight sixteen, thirty two, et cetera approach. It also had sixteen whole kilobytes of memory. That's very very little memory, being very facetious when I say sixteen whole kilobytes, but it was sufficient to store the lighting cues for a show. And

the memory was also non volatile. That's important. It meant that when you turn the system off and then you turn it back on again, the preset cues that you had stored in its memory would still be there. They wouldn't be wiped clean. And that's good because apparently it took quite some time to get the system up and running. For programming, there was a thirty two instruction boot sequence for the system, and you would have to load the

operating system in. You couldn't. It didn't just automatically go into boot right. You had to feed the operating system into this this system, and that was on paper tape. So you would feed paper tape with the operating system into this machine and then it would be ready to go. And that whole process would take like half an hour. So if you think your boot up time is slow at least you weren't using the EDILS eight, but the system could store all of the course line's lighting cues.

The actual operation of the show was not automatic, however, It's not like the computer was watching and listening to the show and then switching lighting at the right time. So instead you would have a human operator who would mann the console and when appropriate, would initiate the next lighting cue using cross faders and other actual manual controls, but all the information for those cues would be in

the system. So essentially, the operator saying all right, I'm going to Q number fifty six and the lights would all come on for Q fifty six. All the lights that are not involved in Q fifty six would come down, and the operator wouldn't have to manually adjust all these things. They would just go from Q to Q, which still is a big job. It's not I don't mean to say that it was easy, but it was definitely easier

than manually controlling everything live every single night. So it's still pretty cool that that came out as early as nineteen seventy five, even though again Broadway was lagging. So it was this convergence of technologies and trends in technology that would allow for the spectacle of moving lights and

live shows. And with all that tech, you still had artistry, right, You still had a designer would have to determine what lighting effects the show would need and for what purpose, and how to highlight things that were going on on stage. They would have to work with engineers to achieve those effects and then save the settings presets, and the system would store these presets and then handle those transitions from

one set to the next. Allegedly it was during a demonstration with a company called Vera Light, which came out of a company called Showco where you know, they specialized in doing these lighting rigs for rock and roll shows.

And supposedly it was during a demonstration where it was purely by accident, where they showed a transition where all the lights were still on, because typically you would bring the lights down, go to a transition where the lights would reposition, and then bring the lights back up again and so then you would get your new effect, but instead the lights were on the whole time when they positioned. You reposition from one set to the next, and that

effect blew everyone away. They were like, oh my gosh, all the lights are still on while they sweep across the stage in this dramatic fashion, and so reportedly something that happened by accident would end up becoming like a best practice's mainstay for concerts moving forward, which is, you know, when we get up to a like what I saw over this past weekend, as various lights were sweeping across

the band and the crowd. Now this show's growing long, I got a ton of other things I could talk about, Like, obviously, we could talk about the development of LEDs, because that would make a huge difference in both size and color for stage lights. We could talk about mirror lights. Mirror lights use a mirror to reflect light from a lamp onto a stage. Big advantage of mirror lights is that you don't have to move the whole lamp to redirect

the light. You just have to move the mirror, so the mirror can be much smaller than the lamp is, which also means you can move it faster, so you can get these really quick transitions where a light moves from one queue to the next super fast, and it can be a really dramatic effect for the audience. Lots of these things would play in but I probably would need to do a second episode to really get into it.

So rather than rattling on about lighting and lighting control systems for another, you know, forty minutes, let's wrap this one up. Maybe we'll revisit and start talking about some of these specific technologies in greater detail. But I'm worried about narrow casting beyond what I'm already doing, so we're going to wrap this up. I hope you're all well. If you have the opportunity to go and see a

rock and roll show, you should take it. Like you know, they're fun and seeing the technical display I think is really fascinating. You know, even if you're not losing yourself in the moment with the music and the crowd and everything. The technical aspects are really phenomenal at shows these days, at least if you're going to one that's like a medium or larger sized venue, check them out. It's really interesting way to see how technology can marry with artistry

to create effects. I think that that's just a fascinating thing. And I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,