L.E.D.: A History of the Future of Lighting by Bob Johnstone

Author:Bob Johnstone [Johnstone, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2017-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

P A R T III: Beyond Mimicry

C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N

Crossing the Chasm D uring the first eighty-odd years of its existence, the incandescent bulb could either be on or off — and that was about it. What people mostly craved was more light, so that they could see better. Little thought was given to control, except in the theater, where for dramatic purposes it was useful to be able to fade lights up and down. To achieve these effects, designers of stage lighting employed rheostats, bulky items that took up lots of space and gave off tons of heat. Enter Joel Spira, inventor of the dimmer. The sine qua non for Spira’s invention was a new type of semiconductor device. Known as a thyristor, it was commercialized by GE in 1958.30 The thyristor functions to control the amount of power that is delivered to an appliance, which it does by switching the current on and off very rapidly, like a gate opening and closing. (The name “thyristor” derives from the Greek word thura meaning “gate.”) GE’s first customers were, predictably, manufacturers of theater lights.

In 1958 Joel Spira was a 31-year-old physicist designing trigger mechanisms for atomic bombs. But the potentially apocalyptic nature of his work troubled the young man, causing him to lose sleep. Casting round for something less life-threatening to do, he stumbled across the thyristor. “Its uses are limited only by the imagination,” an advertisement for the new device bragged. Spira immediately saw that the thyristor’s small size meant that it could fit into an ordinary domestic light-switch wall-box. Perhaps dimming might be attractive to home owners as well as stage directors? A timely thought: a housing boom was then underway in the US, with millions of homes under construction. In the spare bedroom of his New York apartment, Spira began tinkering. He came up with the now-familiar rotary-dial dimmer. In 1961 he moved out to Coopersburg, PA, where he established a firm called Lutron to manufacture his invention.

30 GE was a leader during the early years of the solid-state revolution. At the company’s Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory in Syracuse, New York, Nick Holonyak provided theoretical support for the team that developed the thyristor. In 1962, while still at GE, Holonyak invented the first visible LED.

For any successful startup figuring out what to make is only part of the story. The other - in some ways harder - part is figuring out what to do with what you’ve made. Spira came up with a brilliant marketing strategy: instead of geeks, the typical early adopters, he would target housewives. In the theater, dimming the lights created atmosphere. In the home, he realized, dimmers could be used the same way, to make the mood intimate, softening hard edges, causing wrinkles to disappear, making everyone look more attractive. The link between illumination and romance was of course nothing new. On his 1964 album When Lights are Low Tony Bennett crooned:

Our lips

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