IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2017 - 84
and the total connected lighting load was
836 kW. Interestingly, this installation,
in 1933, replaced the original somewhat
"Rube Goldberg" resistance dimmer installation that dated from the construction
of the building in 1903. The final four
(less impressive) GE thyratron-reactor
installations were in theaters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Iowa City, Iowa; Toronto, Ontario; and Mexico City, Mexico.
Epilogue
Undoubtedly, all of these thyratron reactor installations are long gone (as is
the Roxy). The Radio City Music Hall
installation did remain in use until a
major renovation of the massive theater
in 1999. at that time, all of the reactor/
tube racks were scrapped, but the control board itself was saved, its pit in the
auditorium simply covered over; as of
april 2016, it is still there.
During the 1940s, thyratron tubes
were developed of sufficient capacity
that the tubes themselves could be used
to control the dimming of incandescent lamp loads. Two tubes were used
in an inverse-parallel connection so
that each tube conducted on opposite
half cycles of the impressed ac. By the
1960s, however, the solid-state version
of this concept had come into use. Devices known as silicon-controlled rectifiers were connected in pairs, just as
large thyratron tubes had been, to dim
large lamp loads. stage lighting control
today consists of new generations of
such solid-state devices used as dimmers, along with computerized control
to replace the old manual preset control
scheme used for boards such as that in
Radio City Music Hall (see Figure 8).
Acknowledgment
The author wishes to thank Marc
Grimshaw of the International alliance of Theatre and stage Employees,
Local No. 1, for information regarding
the present status of the original Radio
City Music Hall lighting control board.
For Further Reading
"The Roxy theatre," Marquee, vol. 11,
pp. 1-30, no. 1, 1979.
J. R. Manheimer and T. H. Joseph,
"Electronic tube control for theatre
lighting," presented at the fall meeting of the society of Motion Picture
Engineers, 1934.
J. E. Rubin, "The technical development of stage lighting apparatus in
the United states, 1900-1950," Ph.D.
dissertation, stanford Univ., stanford,
Ca, 1959.
E. D. schneider, "Thyratron-reactor
lighting control," AIEE Trans., vol. 57,
pp. 328-334, June 1938.
L. C. Brenneman, "Radio city music
hall: a technical discussion," Marquee,
vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 18-23, 1999.
T. J. Blalock, "Edison's direct current influenced Broadway show lighting," IEEE Power Eng. Rev., vol. 22,
no. 10, pp. 36-37, Oct. 2002.
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