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- Artificial light, produced mainly by candles, was used in several indoor theatres to light the stage and the auditorium. In the early 17th century, Inigo Jones introduced several innovations in lighting and stagecraft, using reflectors to intensify the light sources and making use of colour on stage.
www.britannica.com/art/stagecraft/Stage-lighting
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During the late 17th century, the dark of the city streets gradually began to recede. At first, citizens in some districts were required to keep lit candles on their street-facing sills during...
Timeline of lighting technology. Lighting through the ages (legend) The price of lighting through the ages. Artificial lighting technology began to be developed tens of thousands of years ago and continues to be refined in the present day.
- Overview
- Early history
The classic Greek theatron (literally, “a place of seeing”) was built in the open air, usually on a hillside, and placed so that the afternoon sunlight came from behind the audience and flooded the performing area with light. The larger Roman theatres were also outdoors, but the added luxury of a coloured awning stretched over the spectators softened the glare of the sun. Later, in the Middle Ages, miracle plays and mystery plays were primarily performed outdoors on the front steps of the church and the adjoining square, although the first dramatized biblical scenes were performed as part of, or following, mass inside the church. There is no record that these scenes were lighted any differently from the mass itself. In England the pageant wagon, complete with actors and properties, was drawn through the main street of a town. Until the 16th century, the theatre continued to be mainly an outdoor institution.
Under the patronage of the aristocracy in Italy, private performances, pageants, and tableaux began to be given indoors. Sebastiano Serlio, an Italian architect, gave considerable attention to theatre design, and in a treatise written in 1545 he discussed theatre construction and the creation of lighting effects. He recommended placing candles and torches behind flasks filled with amber- and blue-coloured water. Andrea Palladio’s indoor theatre, also in Italy, used common light sources: torches, pine knots, open-wick lamps, and tallow candles. In England at the end of the 16th century, the Globe Theatre was used for summer performances of William Shakespeare’s plays, but in winter performances were given in the completely enclosed Blackfriars Theatre. Artificial light, produced mainly by candles, was used in several indoor theatres to light the stage and the auditorium.
In the early 17th century, Inigo Jones introduced several innovations in lighting and stagecraft, using reflectors to intensify the light sources and making use of colour on stage. The earliest known definite description of stage lighting may be found in Architectura Civilis (1628; “Civil Architecture”), by Joseph Furttenbach (also spelled Furtenbach). He describes the use of oil lamps and candles set in a row along the front edge of the stage but out of sight of the audience, and he also mentions vertical rows of lamps behind each wing at the sides of the stage. The common method of lighting the stage and auditorium was by means of tallow candles. As seen in old prints, these candles were mounted in crude hoops or chandeliers, which were hoisted aloft on pulleys to hang in dripping splendour. Gold decorations applied to the interior of the auditorium caught the many reflections. The inconvenience of the lighting system was that candles were expensive and hard to control. The twisted wicks had to be constantly trimmed during the performance, and this was the duty of the snuff boy. A transformation from light to darkness was effected by the agile skill of the candle snuffers.
When David Garrick used footlights at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1765, he masked the candles with metal screens. By 1784, when Richard Brinsley Sheridan managed the Drury Lane, all lights used to illuminate the stage were out of sight, hidden by the now familiar wings and borders.
The floating oil wick lamp was replaced after 1783 by the Argand oil lamp, in which the cylindrical wick was enclosed in a glass chimney to steady the flame and provide a brighter, whiter, and cleaner light source. The chimneyed oil lamp eventually replaced the candle, but it was still hung in clusters above and bracketed to the walls. At the Haymarket Theatre in London, the oil lamps had chimneys of white and green glass that were controlled by levers, so that raising or lowering the chimneys could effect light changes. Actually, rather than subtly shifting the quality of the light, the chimneys’ movement merely made the actors and scenery more or less visible. Stage design and stagecraft had now advanced as far as was technically possible under the limitations of low-intensity stage lighting.
The first major advance in several centuries was the introduction of gas lighting. Near the end of the 18th century, the Scottish engineer William Murdock developed a practical method to distill gas from coal for illumination. The first successful adaptation of gas lighting for the stage was demonstrated in the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1803 by a German, Frederick Winsor. The Chestnut Street Opera House in Philadelphia installed a gas lighting system in 1816 and supplied its own gas by installing a gas generator on the premises. (Gas stations and city mains did not come into use before 1850.) The advantages of gas lighting were immediately realized and exploited, despite the initial cost. No new methods of lighting, however, were devised for stage lighting. The conventions remained the same: footlights (a row of lights across the front of the stage floor), borderlights (a long horizontal row of lights used for the general lighting of the stage from above), and striplights (a row of lights usually mounted in a trough reflector and placed in the wings to illuminate specific portions of the stage or setting).
The classic Greek theatron (literally, “a place of seeing”) was built in the open air, usually on a hillside, and placed so that the afternoon sunlight came from behind the audience and flooded the performing area with light. The larger Roman theatres were also outdoors, but the added luxury of a coloured awning stretched over the spectators softened the glare of the sun. Later, in the Middle Ages, miracle plays and mystery plays were primarily performed outdoors on the front steps of the church and the adjoining square, although the first dramatized biblical scenes were performed as part of, or following, mass inside the church. There is no record that these scenes were lighted any differently from the mass itself. In England the pageant wagon, complete with actors and properties, was drawn through the main street of a town. Until the 16th century, the theatre continued to be mainly an outdoor institution.
Under the patronage of the aristocracy in Italy, private performances, pageants, and tableaux began to be given indoors. Sebastiano Serlio, an Italian architect, gave considerable attention to theatre design, and in a treatise written in 1545 he discussed theatre construction and the creation of lighting effects. He recommended placing candles and torches behind flasks filled with amber- and blue-coloured water. Andrea Palladio’s indoor theatre, also in Italy, used common light sources: torches, pine knots, open-wick lamps, and tallow candles. In England at the end of the 16th century, the Globe Theatre was used for summer performances of William Shakespeare’s plays, but in winter performances were given in the completely enclosed Blackfriars Theatre. Artificial light, produced mainly by candles, was used in several indoor theatres to light the stage and the auditorium.
In the early 17th century, Inigo Jones introduced several innovations in lighting and stagecraft, using reflectors to intensify the light sources and making use of colour on stage. The earliest known definite description of stage lighting may be found in Architectura Civilis (1628; “Civil Architecture”), by Joseph Furttenbach (also spelled Furtenbach). He describes the use of oil lamps and candles set in a row along the front edge of the stage but out of sight of the audience, and he also mentions vertical rows of lamps behind each wing at the sides of the stage. The common method of lighting the stage and auditorium was by means of tallow candles. As seen in old prints, these candles were mounted in crude hoops or chandeliers, which were hoisted aloft on pulleys to hang in dripping splendour. Gold decorations applied to the interior of the auditorium caught the many reflections. The inconvenience of the lighting system was that candles were expensive and hard to control. The twisted wicks had to be constantly trimmed during the performance, and this was the duty of the snuff boy. A transformation from light to darkness was effected by the agile skill of the candle snuffers.
When David Garrick used footlights at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1765, he masked the candles with metal screens. By 1784, when Richard Brinsley Sheridan managed the Drury Lane, all lights used to illuminate the stage were out of sight, hidden by the now familiar wings and borders.
The floating oil wick lamp was replaced after 1783 by the Argand oil lamp, in which the cylindrical wick was enclosed in a glass chimney to steady the flame and provide a brighter, whiter, and cleaner light source. The chimneyed oil lamp eventually replaced the candle, but it was still hung in clusters above and bracketed to the walls. At the Haymarket Theatre in London, the oil lamps had chimneys of white and green glass that were controlled by levers, so that raising or lowering the chimneys could effect light changes. Actually, rather than subtly shifting the quality of the light, the chimneys’ movement merely made the actors and scenery more or less visible. Stage design and stagecraft had now advanced as far as was technically possible under the limitations of low-intensity stage lighting.
The first major advance in several centuries was the introduction of gas lighting. Near the end of the 18th century, the Scottish engineer William Murdock developed a practical method to distill gas from coal for illumination. The first successful adaptation of gas lighting for the stage was demonstrated in the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1803 by a German, Frederick Winsor. The Chestnut Street Opera House in Philadelphia installed a gas lighting system in 1816 and supplied its own gas by installing a gas generator on the premises. (Gas stations and city mains did not come into use before 1850.) The advantages of gas lighting were immediately realized and exploited, despite the initial cost. No new methods of lighting, however, were devised for stage lighting. The conventions remained the same: footlights (a row of lights across the front of the stage floor), borderlights (a long horizontal row of lights used for the general lighting of the stage from above), and striplights (a row of lights usually mounted in a trough reflector and placed in the wings to illuminate specific portions of the stage or setting).
Mar 28, 2024 · Key Takeaways. The pre-industrial world was unrelentingly dark and artificial light was cripplingly expensive. In the mid-19th century kerosene — discovered by Abraham Gesner — started to...
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Jul 28, 2021 · In 1798, he used gas to light the main building of the Soho Foundry and in 1802 lit the outside in a public display of gaslighting, the lights astonishing the local population. One of the employees at the Soho Foundry, Samuel Clegg (1781–1861), saw the potential of this new form of lighting.
- Robert U. Ayres
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Jun 6, 2017 · The first significant improvement in artificial lighting came with the invention of the Argand oil lamp, patented in France by the Swiss Ami Argand around 1780. This utilized a hollow cylindrical wick and a glass chimney, which together improved aeration of the wick and hence the flame temperature.
Oct 14, 2019 · American Lucifers begins a century before Edison’s birth, in 1750. Zallen, a historian, explores the human costs of artificial lighting from then until 1890, concentrating on people producing...
