Lights, TechStuff, Action!

recording TV and movies. You touched on it some in your recent Green Screen podcast. Would you have a podcast about TV movie lighting? You'd get to explain best Boy in Gaffer. I've actually talked about best Boy and Gaffer on another episode. I think I did a full episode about the different roles on a movie set. But we'll get to those again because they are relevant to this and CTB. I absolutely will do more than one episode

on this topic. It's actually gonna require us to go back quite a ways to stagecraft and stage lighting to really understand how lighting has played a critical role in the way we present drama, comedy, and various entertainments. And so this episode, or actually episodes will be a little different from my typical episodes. I could just explain how these lights work from a technological point of view, but

first that wouldn't take a terribly long time. It would be pretty short and sweet, and moreover, I think it misses the more interesting point, which is how artists leverage technology to create specific effects. It's sort of like the difference between talking about how paint is made and how a master artist can take that paint and create a stunning piece of art. We're going to look at not

just the science, but the art behind lighting. With film, television, or digital cameras, lighting is absolutely critical if you want your shot to look good. It's only with the careful coordination of camera and lighting departments that a shot can really look great. You could have an Oscar worthy performance going on, but without good lighting, no one will be able to see it. Moreover, lighting is an important component that contributes to the overall effect a director wishes to create.

Great lighting can make a scene more intimate or harsh, or mysterious or scary. Precise control over lighting allows storytellers to shape a scene in a way that can better evoke the reaction they want out of their audiences. Great lighting can really enhance a scene, and terrible lighting can take away from it. Typically, really good lighting is the type of effect most of us don't really notice, but

bad lighting can be downright distracting. So there's a lot of science and art to this, and there always has been. Now let us remind ourselves why lighting is important in the first place, which is super obvious, but we have to start somewhere. Our sense of vision is dependent upon receptors in our eyes picking up light that is reflecting off of various things. When light hits an object, one of a few things can happen, or a couple or several.

A transparent object will allow much of the light to pass through it, and this is what we would call transmission. The object is transmitting light from one side to the other. So a pane of glass that transmits light an object might absorb the light, in which case the light energy will convert to heat. And the darker an object is,

the more light it's absorbing. Something like vanta black that's a material that's it up of carbon nanotubes can absorb up to nine nine point nine six percent of light, or the object might reflect light the light the object reflects might be across the visible spectrum like a mirror, so you get all the visible light, or it might only reflect a bandwidth of frequencies that correspond to particular

colors of light. A red ball is reflecting light that largely falls in the four point three times ten to the fourteen power hurts frequency that corresponds to red light. That's just an example. By manipulating light that hits a scene, whether that scene is on stage or captured in a camera, you can affect how that scene looks. Again, that falls into common sense. But my goal is to explain why

this works, not just how it works. And we'll do this by talking a lot about history, because you guys know I love to tackle topics way, and let's start with theater. I'd say that the art form of theater grew naturally from the older art of storytelling. By the time we get to the ancient Greeks, we see cities building structures specifically to act as performance spaces, and these

were all outdoors. So the lighting came from natural sources that you know, being the sun, and performed in the daytime. But it didn't boil down to as simple an idea as let's build a big old space that people can sit in and watch their afternoon stories. A lot more planning went into it than that. The location choice needed to take into account when performances would take place, as the sun will be in different parts of the sky, depending not just on the time of day but the season.

You wouldn't want to build a theater that was designed for late afternoon performances if the orientation would mean that the audience is going to be squinting into the setting sun for the full performance, that wouldn't be ideal. The typical Greek theater had a stage near the base of a hill, and the slope of the hill served as the seating area for the audience with wooden or stone benches, and then they could look down upon the action of

the stage. There are some studies that suggest the specific orientation of theaters took into account not just the angle of the sunlight, but also astronomical elements. Because the Greeks would dedicate these theaters to specific gods in their religion, and typically they only held performances during times of the year where they were having holidays devoted to those specific gods.

The Romans followed suit, though they also made some additions, such as building awnings to cover the audience so that they didn't get too hot under the sun. As for the actors, well, they had to suffer for their art. Again, the choice was usually made to lay out the theater in such a way so that the sunlight could illuminate the stage while keeping the audience at least somewhat protected.

But there was really no other means of controlling the light, so you were really just saying I needed to be bright enough for the audience to see what's going on. Everything else is going to be left to their imagination. During the Middle Ages, most theatrical displays, typically in the form of stuff like miracle plays, were performed outdoors. It might be at the entrance of a church or in

a courtyard. A few plays were performed inside churches, which typically allowed light in through massive windows and supplemented that with candles that to provide, you know, more light, but there's no real record of any sort of special stage lighting even in Shakespeare's time. In the early Renaissance in England, most shows were still performed outdoors. The globe theater was an open air structure that relied on light from the

sun to service stage lighting. The construction of theaters like the Globe typically meant sunlight would hit the stage while keeping those who were seated in the galleries relatively shaded. These were seats that were under an awning themselves, and then you had a large area in the middle where the groundlings could stand that was uncovered, and so if you were a groundling, you might be a little exposed

to the sunlight. This meant that the stage crew, again had no real way of changing the lighting or even controlling it at all, and that any scenes that referenced stuff like the dead of night or massive storms relied entirely upon the imagination of the audience. They had to imagine that the scene they were looking at in full daylight was taking place at night. It also meant that shows had to conclude well before sunset because it would

get too dark to see what was happening. Plus, in London there was specifically a curfew, and the Globe Theater was outside the London City gates at that time, so if you were caught out after the gates closed, you'd be kind of stuck. But there were also a few indoor theaters around this time, including the Blackfriars Theater, which was used primarily as a winter theater, since English winters

were a bit too harsh for the outdoor venues. At one point, historians suspected that the shift to indoor theaters might be linked to changes in Shakespeare's own style, but this has since been largely contested, so it's not a done deal. Also, it took a lot of focus for me not to turn this into an entire episode of the technology of Shakespeare's stage, because I focused on Shakespearean studies when I was in college and I'm a little

bit obsessed. So I'll try to stay on track. But if you guys ever want to hear about the full technical breakdown of what Shakespeare's stage was like, let me know, because it is kind of cool. Theaters like the Blackfriars would use candles, and some would also use torches to

provide stage lighting. A couple of decades before Shakespeare was even born, there was an Italian architect named Sebastiano Serlio, and he proposed that one could put flasks, you know, glass bottles filled with different colored liquids, like an amber liquid or a blue liquid, and put that in front of a candle to produce new effects in lighting. So the stage, as you might say, was set, but the

effects were surely modest. In effect. They relied still very heavily on the audience using their imagination in order to affect the brightness of the lights directed at the stage. You had special stage crew who had the job of going around and cutting back candle wicks to reduce the

amount of flame that could provide light. And it was said that if you were really, really good at this, you could sneak on stage without really drawing any focus, and you could get there and cut it back, and just the effect of being able to cut back the light would be enough to draw applause from the audience. They were so appreciative of the skill it took, particularly if your sense of timing was really good, so that you were cutting back the wick just as a line

was coming about a shift in the light. Audiences really seemed to appreciate that. These crew members were typically young boys, and they became known as snuff boys, which sounds pretty terrifying, but no, we're talking about snuffing candles, and really we're talking about trimming them back. The candles at that time were made largely from tallow. Tallow candles are made from animal fat, so these candles were not the cleanest. They were a bit smelly, they were very smoky. You could

get bees wax candles. They were more rare, they're more expensive, but they also produced brighter light and much less smoke. So gradually, over time theaters began to incorporate more bees wax candles. Uh. It was hard to do because they were so expensive early on, but gradually people got better at making them and the price began to go down, and that's really when you started to see used in theaters.

They would also start to create these little mirrored chambers, these little cubbies in which the candles could sit and the mirrors would reflect and redirect light. So rather than just having a candle lighting out in all directions, by using the mirrors, you could redirect all that light into

a more singular direction, and this helped tremendously. The typical indoor theater would have a row of candles or later oil lamps at the end of the stage, each housed in a little structure lined with reflected material like polished metal, and that way the audience wouldn't see the flame they're seeing the back of the chamber, but the light from the chamber would be bright enough to illuminate the action on stage, and these became known as footlights. They were

at the foot of the stage. They were at the level of the actor's feet. That's footlights. It also became a common thing to install similar lights off to either side of the stage, out of the audience's view. This is in an area that is called the wings. Some theaters would also hide lights behind the proscenium arch. Now from the audience perspective, the procenium arch hangs above the front part of the stage. Typically there's a part of

the stage that extends beyond the procenium line. This part is called the apron or sometimes the thrust of the stage, But then you've got the proscenium. Typically this is as far down as actors would walk in a in a normal production, we call it down stage in theater. Behind this is the main part of the stage. Then further back towards the back wall of the stage that's upstage, so the procenium arch lights would provide illumination for more

of the upstage area. You would have lights mounted behind the procenium arch um itself, and that would provide a little more light so that the upstage area would be just as well lit as the downstage area. The transition from candles to oil lamps was also a really important one, So let's talk about candles and oil lamps. I did an episode not too long ago in which I described the wicking effect that candles have. The wick serves as a place where a flame can consume the fuel, which

is not the wick. The fuel is actually the wax of the candle, or, in the case of a lamp, the oil from a lamp. So in tallow candles, the flame is feeding off the fuel of animal fat, and as it does so, it begins to draw more of that melted fat up into the wick, which then burns off and continues this effect of wicking away liquid fuel into the wick itself. With bees wax candles, the fuel is wax made from beeswax. With oil lamps, it's oil, and as the flame consumes the fuel, it raws moore

fuel into it into the wick. That is, the wick itself also burns, It turns more or less into carbon, and it has to be trimmed back on occasion. That's when those snuff boys come back into play. A Swiss chemist named Amy Argonde designed an oil lamp that theaters would quickly adopt to replace the candles they had been

relying upon. Oil lamps provide brighter, steadier light, particularly if the oil lamps used a glass chimney, which would protect the flame from breezes, and stage crew could also use different colors of glass for those chimneys. Typically the choices would fall more or less into clear glass, so just transparent glass or green glass. Some theaters out there their oil lamps with a green glass chimney that could be lowered onto a lamp with a lever, which would be

in effect of dimming the lights. So let's say you've got a scene in your play that goes from daytime tonight. Well, by moving this lever, you could lower those chimneys into place. The lamps would remain lit, but that green glass would block some of the light, and you could have your nighttime scene and would still be visible to the audience, it just wouldn't be as bright. This was used for transitions between scenes as well, or for really particular dramatic effects.

But this was not a subtle change, right. There wasn't like a subtle dimming. It was essentially a move from light to dark, and for a long time this was the pinnacle of lighting effects in theater. Things would change again in eighteen sixteen with a theater called the Chestnut Street Theater, which is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I'll explain more

after we take this short break. Theaters had begun to switch from candles to oil lamps in the late eighteenth century around seventy about forty years later, things would change again. The Chestnut Street Theater in Philadelphia made a switch to gas lighting. Now the theater wasn't telling arriving audiences that they had just seen and really enjoyed a full show. Not that kind of gas lighting. This was using actual

gas lights to illuminate a stage. Now, I've never done a full episode on gaslights and how they came to be, So we'll do a quick rundown here, and I'll have to do a full treatment sometime later. Scientists like Yawn Baptiste von Helmont had learned how to extract gas from coal as early as sixteen o nine, but there wasn't really any practical way to make use of it. People did figure out that the coal gas was flammable and it became kind of a party trick, but it wasn't

really something that people could harness effectively. Nearly two hundred years after one yawn described the extraction process of coal gas, another yawn, This one yawn, Peter ming Eliers, a professor at the University of Louvain, rigged up a lighting system that used the gas as fuel. This was in seventeen

eighty three. In the seventeen nineties, a posh nob named Archibald Cochrane frequently referred to as being quota unquote eccentric, which really just means super duper weird, but rich enough so we don't talk about how he's weird anyway. He used gas to light his home. Cochrane's fellow countryman, a Scott named William Murdoch, would truly establish gas lighting as a means to illuminate spaces, both indoors and outdoors. William Murdoch was an engineer who was working for a foundry

in England in the seventeen nineties. He reckoned that you could transport coal gas through pipes from a center of production to wherever you wanted to light a lamp. So by building out a network of pipes and lamps. You could supply numerous lamp with fuel from a centralized production source using coal gas. The lamps would have a nozzle through which gas could flow, and igniting the flow of

gas would provide light. You would have a steady flame, or that flame could then be used to heat another element called a mantle, which would glow when it reached a high enough temperature. This is called incandescence, and I'll talk about more a little bit later in this episode.

Keeping the gas under pressure would ensure a steady flow of fuel to the lamps, and before long, cities like Paris and London began to install gas lines and gas lamps and gas generators, not a electrical generator running on gas, but rather a specific device that extracts coal gas from coal. This theater in Philadelphia, the Chestnut Street Theater, chose gas lights to illuminate both the interior of the theater in

general and the stage in particular. The company chose to install a as generator in its own building, so it wasn't dependent upon some off site source, and the method for providing light had changed, but otherwise stuff was still pretty similar to the older methods using oil lamps and candles. It's just that the gas lamps were replacing the oil lamps in footlights and the wings and stuff like that. The following year a couple of theaters in London would

follow suit. Now, one of the big advantages of gas lamps was that an operator could control the level of lighting from a centralized location. You didn't have to have people at each station in order to man specific lights.

By opening or closing a valve that fed into, say, all the footlights, for example, an operator could bring lights up or down smoothly and without having to go near the stage and the lights and the auditorium itself could be brought down, which would increase the focus on the stage and allow the audience to become more immersed in the story. This would be the first time where you could easily control all the lights in the theater and

be able to really direct the focus. Over time, the control methods would get more complex, with regulators and valves that allowed the operator to make more subtle changes to specific lights or banks of lights. This gave theatrical companies the ability to provide just the right amount of light to a specific part of the stage. The system of valves became a type of circuit, only one that facilitates the flow of gas to specific lamps rather than electricity.

The operator would use a gas table to refer to which valves needed adjusting to produce specific effects, and this would be a predecessor to the electrical switchboards that you would find in operator booths in theaters today. We'll talk more about the switchboards in our next episode. But while this approach allowed for better lighting, it was also hotter

than candles or oil lamps. You've got a lot more heat produced by this, and it also burned up a lot of oxygen, which could be a problem if say you're a diva in an opera and you're about to burst into an aria, you could actually be in danger of fainting. So there were some drawbacks. Now we're coming up on one of my favorite names in tech history, not necessarily the person, but the name is phenomenal. That name is Sir Goldsworthy Gurney. What a name anyway. Goldie

was an English scientist. He was an architect, he was an inventor. You could call him a renaissance man, though he was post Renaissance. He was born in seventeen three. But among the many things he worked on in his life was a device that could supply a stream of

oxy hydrogen gas. That's just a gas made up of oxygen and hydrogen, and he could supply that to a nozzle that could support a very high flame, and by controlling the flow of that gas, he can control how hot that flame burned, and they could get really hot. So the gas mixture is really flammable, and it puts out a tremendous amount of heat, which not only sustains

the burning process. You know, once you've lit it, it remains lit as long as fuel and oxidizer is going to it, but it can also be used to heat some other element. Now, in this particular case, we're talking about hydrogen being the fuel, oxygen is the oxidizer, and then you add heat and you've got those three points

of a triangle you need to support fire. Now. Enter Thomas Drummond who paired this oxy hydrogen blowpipe which could be used for lots of different stuff, and used a block of material made out of calcium oxide, which is also known as lime. When the very hot flame from this oxy hydrogen blow hype hit the calcium oxide, this calcium oxide or lime would begin to emit an extremely bright white light. The chemical reasons for this get complicated

because it includes both incandescence and possibly cando luminescence. But let's take a stab at it. I mentioned incandescence earlier. What is it, Well, it refers to light produced through heat. If you've ever seen a blacksmith working with metal and they pull the metal out of a forage and it's glowing, you see it's got that kind of reddish orange glow

to it. Or if you look at the old filament lightbulbs, you'll see that there's a little strip that's suspended in the middle of that bulb, and that's what's giving off the light when you flip a switch. In both cases we're looking at incandescence. The key to that light comes in at the atomic level. Heat is a form of energy. By pouring energy into atoms, you start to push the electra ron's that orbit their nuclei out into higher energy shells.

They're being pushed further out from their area of orbit, and this means that they're occupying higher energy states than they normally would. Now, the electrons naturally want to gravitate back to their home energy states, and when they do pop back down, they have to release the excess energy they've absorbed. They can't occupy those lower energy shells with excess energy. They have to get rid of it. They do this by releasing energy in the form of heat

and light. Technically, objects are actually glowing all the time. We're all in condessing all the time. It's just we're doing so at a light frequency that we humans cannot see. Any object that is above absolute zero in temperature is emitting light in the infrared spectrum. And if we could see infrared, everything around us would be glowing at some

level of intensity. But by pouring energy into atoms, we can boost the electrons so that they release photons in shorter wavelengths and higher frequencies than you find an infrared light. And that's where we get to the visible light spectrum. If you remember your roy g BIV, you know red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You know that red represents the lowest energy state of

visible light. So the glowing red orange metal the Blacksmith handles represents a relatively low energy state for those atoms compared to something that might be glowing with a brilliant white light from say limelight incandescence goes from red to orange to yellow to white. By the way, you don't heat something up until it glows blue. But what about candle luminescence? An article in issue seven of Proceedings of

the Society for Analytical Chemistry defines it this way. Quote Cando luminescence the term used to describe the luminescent emission from certain solid materials placed at the edge of a hydrogen diffusion flame. The emission is stimulated in the surface layers of the solid matrix, such as calcium oxide, only if they contain small amounts of impurity metal ions activators. This phenomenon was observed frequently in early blowpipe analyzes and

has been studied sporadically since eighteen forty two. End quote. Moreover, candle luminescence describes a phenomenon in which a material brought to temperature with a flame is going to glow at a greater intensity than we would normally expect if it

were brought to that temperature by other means. So, in other words, you've got a material that might glow red if you were to heat it up, I don't know, like to seven hundred degrees celsius in a forge, but by doing so with a flame rather than with coals or something, the object actually glows yell low, not red well.

This would be an example of candle luminescence. The scientific explanation for why this happens is still a matter of some debate, and I should add there are some physicists who are skeptical that the lime and lime lights was an example of candle luminescence at all, and it may have just been merely incandescence. What we can definitely say is that a very hot flame would heat a piece of lime to the point that that lime would give

off a brilliant white light. By focusing this light through a lens, Drummond could create a really powerful spotlight, which was useful for stage lighting, sometimes used as a follow light, where you have a light following a specific actor as they walk back and forth across the stage. And thus we get the term limelight, and that term would become a saying to describe being the center of focus or attention. You know you're in the limelight. Theaters first began to

use limelight for spotlights around eighteen thirty seven. Gradually, these sorts of lights began to replace footlights and could be used for other effects such as simulating sunlight or moonlight when paired with colors of panes of glass like think of like stained glass, but maybe not so dramatic. Putting that in front of a limelight would allow you to cast a specific color of light onto the stage, and

operating a limelight was no small feat. Each light had to have its own operator, not just to direct the light so that you could follow the action appropriately, but also because the operator would need to reposition that block of calcium oxide. It would get burned down by that flame, and if you just left it there, eventually that light would start to dim because too much of the calcium oxide would have been burned away. So you would have to reposition that block of calcium oxide using you know,

actual UH tools on the light itself. You didn't have to region there, you would have burned your hand off. Also, the operator would have to make sure that the tanks of hydrogen and oxygen still had gas in them and then would have to replace those canisters whenever the fuel ran out. I imagine it also had to be a really warm occupation because those lights put out so much heat.

Gas lights would end up having a relatively short run in theaters, however, as engineers were making steps towards the next big development and lighting, which would be electrical lamps. The earliest electrical lights for the theater were carbon arc lamps, which I talked about not too long ago on this show. The invention of the carbon arc lamp dates back to the early eighteen hundreds, but it would take nearly a

century to really find its use in theaters. A man named Sir Humphrey Davy invented the carbon arc lamp, and it was the first practical electrical light, but it wasn't practical for every kind of use anyway. A carbon arc lamp has a pair of carbon electrodes attached to the positive and negative terminals of a battery or a dynamo or generator, whatever it's connected to. You apply a voltage to these electrodes, you create an electrical potential between them.

You have a negative electrode and a positive electrode, and you can think of it as creating a build up of electrons on the negative electrode side and an absence of electrons, or rather holes for electrons to inhabit on the positive electrode side, and we know that opposite charges attract, so you can think of it as the electrons on the negative side really want to be on the positive side.

When you bring these two electrodes into contact with each other, you complete a circuit, and that strikes the arc, an arc of electricity as electrons flow from the negative to the positive, although we say that the current flows in the opposite direction thanks to Benjamin Franklin. The carbon in the electrodes, specifically on the negative side, begins to ionize and vaporize, and it becomes a plasma or ionized gas. This gas can conduct electricity just as a solid wire would,

so that arc of electricity can be sustained. Pulling the electrodes apart slowly creates a space between the two, and electricity can still pass through this plasma. The light produced is very bright as long as those electrodes are the proper distance from each other. If they're too far apart, the arc will start to stutter. It can't sustain itself. If they're too close together, then the arc won't be bright enough. So you have to have that distance just

right between the two electrodes. But when it is just right, that light is incredibly bright. The electrodes do eventually wear down as they ionize. The negative electrode specifically, it starts to get thinner and thinner, and then the positive one starts to get thicker and thicker, so they have to be replaced occasionally. There are some other drawbacks to carbon arc lamps. That include is the fact that they give off ultra violet light as well as visible light, so

you can actually get a sunburn from a carbon arc lamp. Fortunately, putting a glass diffuser mitigates this because glass can transmit visible light and also block ultra violet light. Carbon arc lamps also create a sort of buzzing sound when they're in operation, and if you position the electrodes too far apart,

they start to sputter. Like I said, So, they're a little delicate and they can be loud, but they were also brighter and cheaper than operating gas lamps, and by the time theaters began to use them in the late nineteenth century, they had improved significantly from Sir Humphreys's original design. I'll talk a little bit more about that when we come back after this quick break. The first theatrical use of electrical lighting that I can find dates back to

eighteen forty six. The Paris Opera installed carbon arc lamps for spotlights, but at this stage, nearly forty years after their invention, the arc lamps are still too inefficient to be considered a solid alternative to the gas powered lime lights. It would take another thirty three years before theater started to consider the carbon arc light a viable upgrade from lime lights. The Paris Opera did continue to pioneer the

use of electric lighting, however. They installed a rainbow projector, and they installed a lighting effect for a fountain as well as a carbon arc spotlight with a housing that was lined with reflectors and lens that had a shutter on it, so the operator could adjust how open the shutter was and be able to adjust the amount of light coming out to hit the stage to create different effects.

In the meantime, there was an actor in England named Henry Irving who became the manager of the Lyceum theater in England, and this was in eighteen seventies, and he introduced some concepts that today we considered standard, but they were revolutionary at the time that he became manager of the Lyceum. There's a term in theater called MSS on scene,

which refers to the visual arrangement of a scene. Originally it was just used for theater, but we also used this in television and film, and it's the art of arranging all the components, including the actors, the set pieces, the props, and the lighting to create the visuals that you want the picture the director wants the audience to see. And for centuries, lighting was more about just making this stuff visible to the audience. It wasn't really part of

designing the scene itself. Irving was one of the artists who would change that. Irving still relied on gas powered lights. He thought the electrical lights were vulgar and that they couldn't provide the effects he wanted, and he refused to use them. He would have stage technicians place pains of colored glass in front of limelights to create different lighting effects, and he would regularly dim the lights and the audience

before a performance. And while that had been done in the past, he was the one who really made it a practice, and according to multiple sources, he was the first manager to arrange for lighting rehearsals so that the technicians would actually learn how to change effects on Q This was a rehearsal mainly for the technicians, not for the actors. It blows my mind that it took that long before this became a common practice. Today, we think

of this as part of tech week for a show. Typically, tech week is torture for actors because it usually involves having to stop and restart scenes repeatedly so that the tech crew can mark down their cues appropriately in practice those those changes. Uh. And for actors this is terrible. Also for directors, this is terrible because we actors tend to get bored and if we're not paying attention, it slows everything down. Uh, it's a nightmare. But that's for

a totally different podcast. Critics at the time weren't necessarily big fans of Irving's textual approach to his material, but they did have a nearly universal approval for his technical process his lighting techniques. In particular, when Irving's theater company went on tour in America, he actually brought along all his technicians and lighting effects, which they would install in the theaters that were hosting them along the tour. He

didn't want to compromise on his vision. Other artists would build upon Irving's dedication to incorporating lighting in scene design. In eight there was a Swiss architect named Adolph Appia who pioneered important work regarding lighting and performance space. He wanted light to be an intrinsic part of creating a scene, and he wanted to incorporate a sense of depth in

the theater. He also wanted to incorporate the manipulation of light into scenes, particularly with the operas of Wagner, so that the audience would see stuff that aligns with what they are hearing. And these are all things that seem common sense to us now that through the dynamic manipulation of light you can create specific effects and really punctuate

the overall intent of a scene. But it was only towards the turn of the twentieth century and the proliferation of electricity that we really gained the fine tuning ability to make such quick, precise adjustments. I mentioned a bit ago that carbon arc lights would get an upgrade that made them more suitable for theatrical applications, and that upgrade came in eighteen seventy six, although it wasn't really used

in theaters for a couple of years. A Russian engineer named pavel Ya Blotchkov came up with a neat way to build a carbon arc lamp without having to manually separate those electrodes to create the arc. Some called it the electric candle, and others called it the blutch CoV light, and it worked on the same basic principle as a standard carbon arc lamp, but in this case, the two electrodes would be held apart from each other by a

mass of something. There be kind of a gap between the two that's held there by a solid material, typically something like plaster, and then connecting the two electrodes would be a very thin conductive wire. So when you supplied electricity to this lamp, a current would run from one electrode through that thin wire to the other electrode. The thin wire would very quickly heat up and break, but it would also spark the arc between the two electrodes,

so the conductive wires gone. It's sort of like a filament in an incandescent bulb burning out. The arc would stay lit until the electrodes were spent, or the material between the electrodes had melted to a point that the two electrodes got closer together and they weren't generating enough light. As a result, they typically could stay lit for about

two hours. Once extinguished, you would actually have to replace the electrodes in the candle, the plaster and the conductive wire would have to be replaced as well, and then you could light it again. But it proved to be a step up from gas lighting. The first theater to install these electric candles was again in Paris, this time

the Hippodrome. After your Blotchkov had demonstrated the efficiency and the power of these electric candles during the Paris Exhibition of eight One of the big draws pun intended of this particular technology is that it didn't require as much

electricity as other carbon arc lamps. It was more efficient, so you could actually light way more of these candles than you would with classic carbon arc lamps, which would typically require a generator for every single lamp, and that got not just expensive but strategically difficult to handle, like where do you put all these things when you're building out a theater space, So this was a big improvement.

In eight eight one, the Savoy Theater in London became the first to convert entirely to electricity, no longer using gas lighting at all. Some of these theaters were embracing carbon arc lamps right as a man named Thomas Edison was leading a team to produce what would become the arc lamps death sentence, and I'm talking about the incandescent lightbulb. This is the old style of light bulb that uses electricity to heat up a filament to the point that

that filament begins to incandesce. Edison did not invent the lightbulb, nor did his team invent the light bulb, but his team was able to improve upon the earlier invention of the lightbulb to create something that was more practical, that could burn brighter and longer than earlier attempts. Edison's original lightbulbs used a carbon filament, but it incandessed fairly well. It just didn't last very long. It burnt through too quickly. It would vaporize and break and then your your light

is dead. And that happens with all incandescent light bulbs. The filament heats up, it vaporizes, that vapor deposits on the inside of the bulb, and meanwhile the filament gets thinner and thinner until it eventually breaks, and then the light extinguishes. So in nineteen o four you had a pair of engineers named fran Johannemann and Alexander Yost who improved on the design by replacing the carbon filament with a filament made out of tungsten that required less electricity

to incandesse, and it also lasted longer. Then others began to fill bulbs with an inert gas that further extended the life of the bulbs, and other people found improvements on the way to weave tungsten so that you've got a more efficient burn of a light bulb. But this isn't an episode about the evolution of light bulb. I actually did an episode about that already, So let's get

back to theater. In eight two, the Munich Exposition in Germany included a theater that was lit entirely by incandescent bulbs. The reaction was really positive, and that year saw a lot of theaters around the world start to install electrical lighting in their buildings and use the incandescent bulbs rather

than the arc lamps. This transition would also mean that the gas tables of the previous century we're making way to electric switchboards, and that allowed a single operator to turn specific lights on or off with various banks of switches, and an entire bank of lights could be wired to a master switch, which allowed a single operator to turn

on numerous lights all at once. So instead of turning individual switches on, so that light number one, light number two, light number three, light number four, and so on all come on, you wire them through a master switch. You flip that one on. All the individuals, which is are also flipped on. All the lights come on as a result, it was a brilliant way to really simplify things. In eighteen ninety six, brothers John and Anton Kleigel founded the

Kleigel Brothers Universal Electric Stage Lighting Company. Now I'm going to talk a lot more about them in the next episode on this topic because their lights would be used not just for the theatrical stage, but also in cinema, which was an art form that was just beginning to take shape at the end of the nineteenth century. The original request for this episode was to talk about Kleague lights,

and they take their name from this company. The brothers were born in Bavaria, but they had immigrated to the United States in eighty eight, and then in the following decade they founded their company. They were both in their twenties when they did this, and they would produce the first product they called a Kleague light in nineteen eleven. This was a carbon arc flood light and it would

find its use in indoor filmmaking projects. It is also not the only product they made they called a Kleague light, and I'll talk more about them in the next episode. In nineteen o two, Mariano Fortuny created a new method of lighting stages. So rather than aiming lights directly at the stage, he set up silks of different colors near

the stage. He would direct the light at the silks, and the silks reflected light back onto the stage different colors of light, and reportedly the results created a more natural lighting for the stage. Theaters began to install incandescent spotlights. They were replacing the limelights and carbon arc lamps with one thousand what bulbs, and this started around nineteen thirteen. Wattage, by the way, describes the rate of energy transfer, and it can be thought of as a way of expressing

energy per unit of time. Now for incandescent bulbs, higher wattages essentially correlate with brighter bulbs, so a sixty what bulb is brighter than a forty what bulb? And so on. In the theater they were using one thousand what bulbs By night, some theaters were beginning to experiment with motorized color wheels, and a color wheel is a wheel with different panels of different colors of transparent material like glass.

So think of a wheel kind of like a pie, and each slice of the pie is a different color. An operator would position the wheel in front of a light so that the light is shining through a single panel, and then if you rotate the wheel, you move a different color of glass or whatever in front of this light. Attaching a color wheel to a motor allowed a single operator to manipulate the color of light hitting the stage and meant you didn't have to swap out pains or

later gels for specific lights as much. And a gel, which i'll talk about a little bit more in our next episode, is just a transparent piece of film that has a color or sometimes a pattern or sometimes both on it, and it fits in front of a light. So a lighting technician would outfit a light with a specific gel and it would stay there. You typically don't swap gels out in the middle of performance, but you're

doing it to create specific effects. So light designers use combinations of colors to create a more natural or dramatic light. Some lights might have blue gels to help simulate a nighttime scene, for example, So you might have three or four lights that have blue gels and you turn those on for your nighttime scene and you turn them off for all the other ones. Other lights might use orange

or yellow or red gels to simulate sunlight and so on. Well, we still have a ton of stuff to cover on this topic, and I think the thing I most want to communicate again is that this is a great way for us to look at technology and how it plays an important part in creativity and expression. So it's not enough that we understand how the technology works, but also how to best put that technology to use to create

It's something that's more than just illumination. In our next episode, we will continue down the stage lighting path a little further so that we can get up to modern day, and then we're going to switch over to how lights were used in filmmaking, which is gonna mean that we're gonna have to backtrack a little bit, because all of this is really happening at the same time, but I think it's easier to follow if we stick with one

path before we jump onto the other. In the meantime, if you guys have suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, you can reach out to me on Twitter like Charlie Tango Bravo did, and that handle once again is text stuff H s W. I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.