Bright Ideas: DIY Stage Lights From The 1930s And Today

LED Wall Courtesy Julian Bajsel

NOW

LED VIDEO WALL

When the electronica band Starf--ker needed a portable video display, it turned to Hans Lindauer and Alex Norman, two members of a Portland, Oregon–based hacking community called DorkbotPDX. The duo designed an 80-pound, 8-by-13-foot LED wall that displays the band’s trippy-looking videos from an iPod. Lindauer built translucent scaffolding out of plastic greenhouse panels and tucked strings of red-green-blue LEDs inside; Norman wrote software to translate incoming video signals for the collapsible wall. Built in three months for $8,000, the wall performed flawlessly during a pretour stage performance at Musicfest NW in Portland, where Lindauer and Norman set it up in 20 minutes and tore it down in three.

Suitcase Stage Lights:  Popular Science Archives

THEN

SUITCASE STAGE LIGHTS

In 1937, PopSci published instructions to build a lightweight stage-lighting kit. The plans included a $10 ($161 today) switchboard-in-a-suitcase, a tin-can spotlight, compact footlights, and a dimmer made from running electricity through a bucket of saltwater. Some kit builders lived to share their glowing reviews: “The switchboard has been used very successfully by Wesley Players, an amateur dramatics society conducted by students at the universities of Wisconsin and Purdue.”