ABSTRACT
How could the giants of the lighting world miss this idea? Actually, remote control of luminaires had been around for a long time. From my trips throughout the world — specifi cally, what I saw in Japan’s NKH television studios and at the BBC in London in the early 1970s, as well as reports out of Germany — I was aware of earlier usage of motorized luminaires. However, these were only pan and tilt devises added to the fi xture, not a total new design with RGB, CYN, or dichroic color changes. So what made this such an historic introduction? One explanation would be that the established lighting community saw it as a rock & roll effect only and didn’t visualize its potential in theatre and television . This is not the fi rst time the mainstream has been slower than rock & roll to pick up on a concept. (The list is long, including the PAR-64, trusses, multicable, and portable packaging of dimming). Again, tour lighting ingenuity had taken an existing technology and improved it tenfold.
